Low-Risk Offenders on the Loose

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has released several hundred people from its detention centers across the country, saying it needs to save money ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday.  The detainees were not simply let loose, but placed under other forms of supervision, and their deportation cases will proceed.

It’s a strange development — not just because the White House has made extraordinary efforts to sweep a record numbers of immigrants into custody, but also because the White House and the Secretary of Homeland Security say they didn’t know about it until yesterday. The decision was made not at the top, but by “career officials” at ICE, the White House spokesman Jay Carney said today.

Strange, too, that weighty decisions about immigration policy are being made for reasons of last-minute penny-pinching – but that’s true of all the mindless government cuts forced by the budget deal known as the sequester.

ICE says the people released were noncriminals and “low-risk offenders.” If that’s true, it’s fair to ask why they were in prison in the first place, given that alternatives to detention, like electronic monitoring, are highly effective and far cheaper. The administration’s move seems to validate what immigrant advocates have long said: that imprisoning suspected immigration violators who are not charged with serious crimes just so they show up at deportation hearings is a waste of money and resources. It can also be cruel, given the grim conditions and long record of abuses at detention centers.

But so entrenched is the view among hard-liners that “illegal immigrant” means the same thing as “criminal alien” that the news led to a freakout. To the Fox News crowd, it was as if the Administration had suddenly thrown open the gates to Sing Sing, Joliet and Guantanamo, leaving America vulnerable to a human tide of dangerous foreigners.

“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” said the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Bob Goodlatte, in a statement. “By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives.”

Senator Jeff Sessions accused Mr. Obama of having “no commitment to enforcing the law,” and Paul Babeu, a sheriff in Arizona who dabbles in anti-immigrant activism, told FoxNews.com, without evidence, that Homeland Security planned to release “nearly 10,000” people, raising the specter of “criminal illegals” running loose in his state. (D.H.S. says it released only a few hundred people.)

Mr. Goodlatte and the others have it backward: This administration and the one before it have overstuffed detention cells with “low-priority” detainees who were swept up by overzealous policing and unjust, indiscriminate enforcement policies. Immigration detention is big business. There are many things horribly wrong with the immigration system today, but having too little detention — keeping too few traffic violators, visa overstayers and other noncriminal, nonviolent, nonthreatening immigrants behind bars — is not one of them.

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