President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to keep detention space unfilled as several recent cases revealed that criminal illegal aliens were released into American communities after crossing the United States-Mexico border.
As of April 25, DHS had just a little more than 34,000 illegal aliens in its detention facilities — a fraction of the 6.2 million illegal aliens who, by the end of Fiscal Year 2023, are in deportation proceedings but are living throughout the U.S. on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) non-detained docket.
The low detention rate comes after Congress approved 41,500 ICE beds for the rest of the fiscal year, far above the 25,000 ICE beds that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requested.
Mayorkas asked Congress to cut bed space for Fiscal Year 2025, requesting 34,000 beds and justifying the request, writing:
Corrective actions which could result in increased Average Daily Population (ADP) include allocating more resources for additional bedspace and the enhancing the hiring and retention of detention officers. It is important to note that policy priorities seeking to limit detention of noncitizens assessed to not pose a threat to national security or public safety make significant increases in ADP unlikely under current circumstances. [Emphasis added]
RJ Hauman, with the National Immigration Center for Enforcement, said Biden’s DHS has consistently complained about a lack of resources to enforce federal immigration law but consistently refuses to use such resources to their full capacity.
In this case, Hauman said, that’s detention space.
“Custodial detention and GPS monitoring are critical immigration enforcement functions that must be expanded across the board,” Hauman told Breitbart News.
“Instead, Alejandro Mayorkas is refusing to enforce laws he was sworn to uphold, often under the guise of ‘limited resources.’ But when he is given more resources, he doesn’t use them,” he continued.
The administration’s detention agenda has consequences.
Most recently, several criminal cases showed illegal aliens who were released into the U.S. interior, rather than being put into ICE detention, who went on to commit crimes. For example, Grevi Geovani Rivera Zavala of Honduras was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison after raping a teenage girl in a public bathroom in Prattville, Alabama, last year.
Zavala arrived at the southern border in November 2021 using a fake name. Despite having a criminal record in his native Honduras, DHS officials only briefly detained Zavala and then released him into the U.S. interior.
Likewise, a 20-year-old illegal alien from Brazil was released into the U.S. interior in July 2021 and later charged with raping a child in Milford, Massachusetts.
In one of the most high-profile cases recently, 18-year-old illegal alien Elmer Rueda-Linares was charged with the death of 38-year-old Kurt Englehart, a father and a state senior adviser to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV).
Rueda-Linares, instead of being placed in ICE detention, was released into the U.S. interior only a few months after having crossed the southern border.
“This is a middle finger to Congress, American taxpayers, and the safety of our nation,” Hauman told Breitbart News.
Though Mayorkas has been insistent on keeping detention space at stagnant levels, Acting ICE Director Patrick Lechleitner has said he would like bed space to increase to 50,000 — a figure he called “more appropriate” considering the record levels of illegal immigration seen under Biden.
Since Biden took office in early 2021, more than nine million migrants have been encountered at the nation’s borders, the largest ever recorded in American history over a three-and-a-half-year period.
“… it would take 16 years to remove just the roughly two million got-aways on your watch — to say nothing of the more than 9 million encounters, many of whom have also been released,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) told Mayorkas on April 16.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
