On Wednesday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director under President Obama, commented on recent crimes where the suspects were in the country illegally, and specifically the Jocelyn Nungaray case, by stating that “the bottom line here is the problem is the sheer volume of people coming across the border” and that the volume, coupled with a lack of resources to detain people, means that the government has to make judgment calls about who’s a threat and that’s “incredibly hard.”
Sandweg said, “Look, Natahsa, the bottom line here is the problem is the sheer volume of people coming across the border. And look, I don’t want to sound — it’s becoming almost like cliché in Washington, but, also we have a major resource problem. So, first of all, I think it’s just important to recognize, ICE operates about 40,000 detention beds. That’s all the funding they have available to them. There’s also a shortage of beds nationwide. So, ICE can detain about 40,000. The hard part is, when individuals come across the border, and like I said, we vet them, we don’t see any necessarily derogatory information about them. But, let’s say they’re a member of a gang in El Salvador, it’s possible that Border Patrol — either that information hasn’t been fed into the Border Patrol system and it’s been missed or simply it’s not available to us. So, at that point, the government, CBP and ICE, have to make a decision about whether to use one of those 40,000 beds to detain them. When you’re getting 100,000 — and those numbers have dropped, obviously, since the president’s order — but when you’re getting 100,000 a month, you can only detain less than 10% of that population, because — well, you’re detaining people for multiple months. So, you really have a limited ability to detain.”
He continued, “And so, the trick here is, how do you decide whether someone’s a threat or not? It’s obviously incredibly hard. They obviously missed some very dangerous individuals who pose a terrible threat. Once they’re in the country, right now, you put them on an ankle bracelet and ICE is very good at monitoring them. But if you get an individual who’s going to cut off the bracelet, it’s really just a numbers game, right? How many — when you have millions of people under your supervision and you have no indication that person’s a threat, ICE is just probably not going to prioritize the apprehension of that particular individual.”
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