Despite a massive budget increase for the department charged with handling the illegal immigrant crisis, deportations by the U.S. Customs and Enforcement agency have plummeted 43 percent in just three years, according to federal data released by Sen. Jeff Sessions Monday.



A new fact sheet from the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, chaired by the Alabama senator, said ICE agents removed 235,413 illegal immigrants in fiscal 2015, a decrease of 174,436 from the 409,849 removed in fiscal 2012.

The biggest drop off came from deportations of illegal immigrants deep inside the United States rather than at the border, according to the data from the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, ICE received $3,431,444,000 for removal and detention of immigrants in fiscal 2015, a whopping increase of $680 million over the fiscal 2012 budget of $2,750,843,000.

Bottom line: ICE received roughly $3,900 more in funding for each fewer alien it deported.

From the subcommittee:

According to statistics provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, deportations of aliens from the United States have decreased precipitously under the Obama Administration – particularly of those aliens from the interior of the United States. In FY 2012, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed 409,849 aliens from the United States, with 180,970 coming from the interior of the United States. In FY 2015, ICE removed 235,413 aliens, with only 69,478 coming from the interior.

Put differently, ICE removed nearly 43 percent fewer total aliens from the United States in FY 2015 than it did in FY 2012 – and nearly 62 percent fewer aliens from the interior of the United States.

This dramatic decline in deportations is the direct result of policies implemented by the Obama Administration to get around plain law passed by Congress. Indeed, the guise was to assert that the Government lacked the resources to deport more aliens. The former Director of ICE, John Morton, issued a memorandum in March of 2011, in which he outlined ICE's purported enforcement "priorities," and claimed that setting such priorities was necessary because ICE "only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal alien population in the United States." The Administration has used this line repeatedly, even citing it in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This statistic also appeared in a Memorandum Opinion written by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel in late 2014 in its attempt to justify the Administration's latest policies – stating that "DHS has explained that although there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country, it has the resources to remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year."

Notwithstanding the Administration's claims of limited resources, ICE's budget for detention and removal operations has grown substantially – from $2,750,843,000 in FY2012, to $3,431,444,000 in FY2015. Moreover, just last year, the Administration shifted $113 million away from ICE's budget for detention and removal of aliens.

Thus, while ICE's detention and removal budget grew approximately 25 percent from FY 2012 to FY 2015, the total number of aliens it deported from the United States decreased by nearly 43 percent.

Furthermore, ICE removed 235,390 criminal aliens from the United States in FY 2012, as compared with 139,368 in FY 2015 – meaning that it deported nearly 41 percent fewer criminal aliens last year with 25 percent more resources than it had in FY 2012.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com