Former President Donald Trump shredded Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of what turned out to be a highly controversial visit to a segment of the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday following the release of new data on criminal aliens by the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The House Homeland Security Committee released new data from the agency on Friday, noting that “the Department of Homeland Security knows of at least 660,000 illegal immigrants at large in the U.S. with criminal records, including 13,000 convicted killers, nearly 16,000 convicted of sexual assault and 56,000 involved with dangerous drugs,” the Washington Times reported.
Trump said during a rally in Walker, Mich., that Harris is “getting killed on the border.”
“That she went to the border, this was a bad day because somebody just released the numbers. They came out through ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” he added.
Trump has been saying for years that dangerous criminals were among the millions of people the Biden-Harris administration has allowed to cross illegally into the country.
According to this brand new data never seen before, over 13,099 convicted murderers have crossed the border free to roam and kill in our country. These are convicted murders,” Trump added. “These are people that were just been talking about this for three years.”
“More than 13,000 convicted murderers have been let out of jail, and they’re roaming our streets, our country, all over and every state is a border state. You know what that means, right? Every state, because they fly them in,” Trump went on.
“And these are serious, serious criminals coming out of jails, mostly from jails, a lot of gang members. They take their gangs off the street, like in Caracas, Venezuela. The criminals have all been brought to the United States. Their crime rate is down in Caracas,” he added.
He noted further on social media: “Kamala should immediately cancel her news conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our country during her three-and-a-half-year period as border czar.”
Thousands of additional migrants have been charged with these and other offenses but have not yet been convicted, the Times reported, citing the data. They are included in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “non-detained docket,” a list of over 7 million undocumented immigrants that ICE is tasked with monitoring while they remain free within the United States.
“It may be shocking to hear that the Biden-Harris administration is actively releasing tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens into our communities, but their own numbers conclusively prove this to be the case,” said Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.).
Jessica Vaughan, the Policy Studies Director at the Center for Immigration Studies, who has been monitoring the data for years, stated that the most recent figures indicate a significant rise compared to the past decade.
She attributed this increase to the Biden administration’s relaxation of interior immigration enforcement, said the Times.
“Most deportations that happen from the interior are criminals, so when you cut the number of deportations from the interior, you’re allowing criminals to stay here,” she told the outlet.
Acting ICE Director Patrick Lechleitner, who submitted the data to Congress, explained that the agency focuses on detaining serious criminals such as convicted murderers. He added that ICE assesses each case individually, considering the potential risk to public safety and the likelihood of the individual fleeing.
“ICE takes other factors into consideration as well, including when a noncitizen has a serious medical condition, is the primary caregiver of minor children, or other humanitarian considerations,” he said.
The U.S. government can sanction countries that do not take back their criminal citizens, and the Trump administration regularly used that power. But, the Times reported, the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done so with any frequency.
