States Fight Biden's Prison-to-Streets Pipeline for Illegal Immigrant Convicts
The Biden administration has allowed a more than eleven-fold increase in the number of illegal immigrant convicts let out of Texas prisons and into the general U.S. population, despite federal immigration law requiring ICE to take convicts into custody after serving their time, usually in advance of deportation.
The disclosure emerges from state-initiated litigation that is beginning to shed light on what critics call the administration's secretive and lenient handling of immigrants beginning last year – treatment that is imperiling public safety, alarmed state authorities say.
Soon after President Joe Biden assumed office a year ago January, agents of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement began dropping their usually automatic requests to take custody from Texas authorities of illegal immigrant convicts set to be released from the state's prisons and jails, so they could be deported.
In the past, few such convicts were exempt from the process. From 2017 to 2020, IC