About 179,000 criminal immigrants remain in the country despite being convicted of crimes, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which also told Congress that sanctuary cities should not be required to cooperate with immigration officers.
Almost 1 million people have been ordered to leave the country, but have not done so. “Of the 929,684 aliens with final orders of removal who remain in the United States, 179,027 have criminal convictions,” according to the DHS memo written in response to a July 7 letter from Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) and several other GOP senators.
The memo gives statistical weight to a problem that Republicans had in past identified anecdotally. The presence of criminal immigrants in the United States made national headlines in July, when San Francisco’s Kathryn Steinle was killed by an illegal alien who had been deported five times. Because San Francisco maintains a policy of refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials, the shooting renewed a debate about sanctuary cities and the executive orders that President Obama issued to shelter some immigrants from the threat of deportation.
“Immigration enforcement is not supposed to be a game of Russian roulette where we release habitual immigration violators into U.S. communities and hope and pray they don’t go on to commit additional criminal offenses,” Sessions wrote in his July 7 letter.
House and Senate Republicans have pressed Obama’s team to crack down on sanctuary cities, citing Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson’s stated opposition to the practice. “The Administration’s position is that making immigration detainers mandatory would be counterproductive to solidifying cooperation with law-enforcement authorities in its efforts to promote public safety,” the DHS memo to Sessions says.
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426370/dhs-179000-criminal-immigrants-america
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