Judicial Watch continues their bang-up work in the investigative journalism field, checking into how the Department of Homeland Security is handling their responsibilities on the border when it comes to illegal immigrants. What they’ve found this month would be shocking if it weren’t so in keeping with border security policies under the Obama administration. It seems that locking up, tracking and processing Other Than Mexican (OTM) border crossers and sending them back to their homeland is a bit too much effort in some cases, so loading them up on buses and dumping them off in places further from the border where they won’t receive as much scrutiny is the preferable option. (Judicial Watch website)

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road… A security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is called G4S and claims to be the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida. Judicial Watch is filing a number of public records requests to get more information involving the arrangement between G4S and the government, specifically the transport of illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to other parts of the country.

DHS continues to deny that this is happening, or at least insists that they are following all of the required procedures, but the JW investigations are pretty damning. They also corroborate testimony from the head of the Border Patrol union who recently complained to Congress that they were being ordered to release illegals (including felons) without any sort of accountable tracking process. When Judicial Watch reporters interviewed the actual Border Patrol agents involved in these northbound transfers, they found that the illegals were not only skipping any sort of detention, they didn’t even have a court date set to appear before a judge. They simply had to “promise” that they would show up for a hearing if and when they were notified. (How anyone was supposed to track them down to notify them is not specified.) The names of the “relatives in the United States” they contacted prior to their release were not screened.

All of this seems to be in keeping with current administration policies regarding how and if the public is informed about these matters. Just recently, a member of Congress told the Washington Free Beacon that the administration is seeking to withhold information from the public regarding more than 80,000 illegal aliens who are convicted criminals but have been released and remain on the loose.

Rep. Brian Babin (R., Texas) told the Free Beacon that the administration is trying to suppress information about the release of some 86,000 criminal illegal immigrants who have committed 231,000 crimes in just the past two and a half years. Babin, who is spearheading new legislation to boost the deportation rate of these criminals, many of whom continue to walk free across America, warned that the administration is not taking action to deport these criminal illegal immigrants once they are freed from U.S. prisons. “All I can think of is they don’t want the general public to know what’s going on,” Babin said in an interview. “When you have 86,000 criminal aliens committing 231,000 crimes just over the last two and half years, I don’t think they want the public to know what’s going on.”

I suppose that’s understandable from the administration’s point of view. I mean, that doesn’t really make for a tasty set of headlines during an election year. So how bad is the recidivism rate for illegal aliens? This report from the Boston Globe indicates that it’s not only bad.. it’s far worse than the numbers which ICE has been trying to peddle to Congress in recent hearings. Nearly a third of the criminal illegal aliens in their study committed new crimes in short order, including very serious, violent felonies.

A Globe review of 323 criminals released in New England from 2008 to 2012 found that as many as 30 percent committed new offenses, including rape, attempted murder, and child molestation — a rate that is markedly higher than Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have suggested to Congress in the past. The names of these criminals have never before been made public and are coming to light now only because the Globe sued the federal government for the list of criminals immigration authorities returned to neighborhoods across the country. A judge ordered the names released in 2013, and the Globe then undertook the work that the federal government didn’t, scouring court records to find out how many released criminals reoffended.

Read through that article at your leisure. It’s a real eye opener. We’re not just talking about a failure of policy here, though that much should be clear by now. This collection of stories adds more fuel to the growing perception that the White House has been engaged in a continued public relations campaign to not only soften immigration enforcement, but deceive the American public as to the dangers such policies pose. Refusing to release this information keeps citizens in the dark and puts them at risk, all in the name of pushing through “comprehensive immigration reform.”