This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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My colleague Jessica Vaughan has written at some length about the importance of maintaining the congressional mandate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintain a filled capacity at any point in time of 34,000 detention beds.
Ms. Vaughan has also pointed out that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has floated the trial balloon, in recent congressional testimony, that the mandate is more like a suggestion – DHS is required by law to keep paying the bills for the beds, at taxpayer expense, but not necessarily to fill them.
This is fatuous, given that the government, in not keeping the beds filled, is also violating a number of other federal laws requiring detention of certain kinds of immigration violators, such as aggravated felons, reentrants after deportation and, notably, arriving asylum applicants.
It is no surprise, therefore, that open borders advocates have picked up Johnson’s refrain and run with it – particularly since they are now pressing the White House to ignore other federal requirements to enforce the immigration laws.
In a recent posting, reporter Leslie Berestein Rojas writes of the push for a reduction in detention capacity: “It would be a small step in the right direction for activists like Silky Shah of the Detention Watch Network. She says these kinds of quotas create the wrong kind of incentive. ‘Whenever you are basing it on an idea that beds need to be maintained, then it is really completely arbitrary,’ Shah said. ‘Essentially you have to find people to deport, people to fill these beds, whether or not there is a need.'”
Nice try, Ms. Shah. Equating the detention mandate to an arbitrary quota is patently absurd. There are somewhere north of eleven million aliens in this country illegally – and more attempt entry each and every day from both northern and southern land borders, not to mention those who attempt illegal entry through our maritime waters, nor those ineligibles who apply for entry at the air, land, and sea ports of entry. In that light, maintaining bed space foronly 34,000 at any point in time seems modest indeed – particularly since ICE is already failing in its detention responsibilities.
“Whether or not there is a need”? I guess there’s a need only if you care about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.
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