President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a Senegalese migrant into the United States from the southern border despite having available detention space to hold him. The migrant is now charged with raping a woman in New York City.
Papa Diop, a 38-year-old migrant from Senegal, was arrested and charged with first-degree rape after he allegedly followed a woman in the South Bronx, asked her for directions, and then held her down on a public park bench as he raped her, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) reported.
Diop was reportedly released into the U.S. interior shortly after he illegally crossed the southern border near Yuma, Arizona, in May 2023. DHS officials claimed to the New York Post that Diop was released due to a lack of detention space.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention data, which Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University collected, tell a different story.
In the month that Diop was apprehended near the southern border, ICE had anywhere from 7,000 to 13,000 available detention beds.
“The no space in detention centers excuse is nonsense,” the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE) wrote on X. “Congress provided 34,000 daily detention beds in [Fiscal Year 2023]. Public data shows [sic] that detention bed availability fluctuated between 7,000-13,000 in the month of May. Harris and Biden chose to release, not detain.”
Diop’s release into the U.S. despite available ICE detention space is one of the thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, of cases in which migrants were freed into American communities — rather than being held in ICE custody — and went on to commit crimes against Americans.
In the alleged rape and murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston, Texas, for example, both illegal alien suspects were released into the U.S. interior by Biden and Harris’s DHS despite thousands of open ICE detention beds.
Similarly, the illegal alien suspect accused of murdering 22-year-old Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, was released into the U.S. interior by Biden and Harris’s DHS. At the time of his apprehension near the southern border, there were more than 8,000 available ICE detention beds.
Harris, now running for president, previously vowed to dismantle the already limited ICE detention space that Congress funds.
While running in the Democrat presidential primary in 2020, Harris said she would “shut … down” privately run immigration detention centers “on day one” of her presidency. Federal data shows that nine in ten illegal aliens held in detention centers are in privately owned facilities.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
