According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, over 400,000 border crossers who have been found guilty of a crime and released into the country’s interior are now residing across the country as they wait for their deportation hearings.
In a discussion with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday at a Senate Homeland Security hearing, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) brought up the number.
Marshall informed Mayorkas, “Your budget shows there are over five million illegal aliens who are on the non-detained docket awaiting deportation. Over 400,000 convicted criminal immigrants are living in this country out of the five million total.”
In fact, DHS’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2024 notes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “had over 5.2 million cases on its Non-Detained Court Docket along with more than 20,000 cases on the Detained docket” in the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2023.
The over 5.2 million border crossers listed on the Non-Detained Docket are those who are not in ICE custody and are residing all throughout the country. Some people won’t face a federal immigration judge for five to ten years.
As they wait for their deportation hearings, 5.2 million border crossers are residing all across the country, as opposed to 3.26 million in fiscal year 2020 and 3.6 million in fiscal year 2021. According to the figures, the Biden administration increased the number of non-detained border crossers by about two million.
Nearly 408,000 of the 5.2 million border crossers have criminal records, and they will wait for their deportation hearings while living freely elsewhere in the country.
According to the DHS budget request, “there were 407,983 convicted criminal noncitizens in the NonDetained Docket as of the first quarter of FY 2023. The Non-Detained Docket’s caseload for law enforcement officers is growing at a rate that is outpacing the growth in the number of law enforcement officer staff resources that are needed to handle the docket.”
