Last week U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that left-wing officials in Cook County, the home of Chicago, released over 1,000 illegal aliens last year, despite requests from federal officials to detain them indefinitely.

Speaking Sunday morning on “Fox & Friends” about these releases, former acting ICE Director Thomas Homan explained why “there is no justification” for them.

“Well, first of all, we’re talking about Chicago, right?” he said to host Pete Hegseth. “The violence in Chicago is unprecedented.”

And has remained unprecedented for years. During the first weekend of 2020 alone, in fact, three were killed and 15 were wounded in shootings across the city.

Listen to his full remarks below:

(Source: Fox News

“You would think elected officials would want to do everything they can to make sure criminals aren’t on their streets,” Homan continued. “But if you’re an illegal alien, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re getting released every day to re-offend.”

“Anybody can look up recidivism rates. Fifty percent will re-offend the first year. Up to 75% will re-offend within five years. But here’s the big thing: It’s more than 1,000, Pete.”

The problem with ICE’s statistics is that they only pertain to illegals aliens who’ve been arrested by immigration authorities and had their fingerprints run through the system.

“[W]hen they ran the fingerprints against ICE, it was bounced against the DHS database, so we know because we’ve arrested them before,” he said of the 1,000 or so illegals who were identified by ICE as having been released by Cook County authorities.

“However, there’s thousands of illegal aliens in jails and sanctuary cities that weren’t arrested by the border control — they got by the border control. There’s no record in DHS databases. That’s why we need access to the jail, because every year ICE arrests thousands upon thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens in jails that we don’t have records on.”

If an illegal alien bypasses border officials but winds up being arrested by local authorities for a crime, this gives ICE the opportunity to scoop up the illegal and enter his information into the system before obviously deporting him. But this opportunity is being denied because of the intransigence of officials like those in Cook County.

Moreover, this intransigence is putting people’s lives at risk:

Illegal immigrant arrested for shooting Cali officer released from previous offense due to ‘sanctuary laws’ https://t.co/X5OGpPdyUo via @BIZPACReview — Peggy James (@PEGGYEJAMES) September 10, 2019

“We call them foreign-born nomads when we don’t have any fingerprints,” the former acting ICE director said of those illegals whose data hasn’t been obtained yet.

“Hundreds of thousands of these people have been arrested in the last couple of years, so access to the jails is what we need. Not just taking our detainers and releasing the illegals that we want, but giving us access to the jails to find the 100,000 other ones that are in the country illegally that are going to recommit offenses in our communities.”

But as the situation in Cook County demonstrates, some left-wing officials are refusing to honor ICE’s detainers and also blocking ICE from surveying their jails. Sadly, this is even happening in ostensibly red states like North Carolina.

In the summer of 2018, Orange County stopped honoring ICE’s detainers and released a criminal alien who’d been sentenced to time served for a conviction involving the sexual battery of an 11-year-old child.

In December of that year, after Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker was sworn into office, both Durham County and Wake County also stopped honoring ICE’s detainers. Months later, in September of last year, Baker’s officers released an illegal alien registered sex offender, despite a request from ICE.

Dovetailing back to Cook County, when Fox News reached out to county officials for comment about ICE’s findings, they said they had “no comment at this time” and pointed the network to “two laws for relevant context.”

But according to Homan, there are no laws that would justify their actions.

“There is no justification,” he said. “Releasing a public safety threat back into the public to re-offend when you can turn them over to ICE legally — to release them knowingly back to the public, that’s just stupid.

“And there’s no law they’re going to point to that can convince me or any other patriot that it’s right to release somebody that’s in the country illegally in violation of federal law and refuse to hand them over to the federal agency. They wouldn’t do that to the FBI, they wouldn’t do that to DEA, they wouldn’t do that to ATF. Only ICE. This is a political battle, and there’s no legal basis for it.”

Cook County declined more than 1,000 ICE detainers in FY19 https://t.co/BoBQtsbDdQ pic.twitter.com/k4ONYnF1uY — ICE (@ICEgov) January 11, 2020

According to ICE, among those who were released by Cook County last year were a 50-year-old South African national who was arrested in June for indecent exposure, and a 22-year-old citizen of Lithuania who was arrested for attempted murder.

And among those illegals who’ve been arrested and are slated to be released by Cook County officials sometime soon is a 27-year-old citizen of Jordan who was arrested for recklessly discharging a firearm.