U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced plans to locate and initiate proceedings against 78,000 illegal aliens that the agency previously allowed to enter the country.
Beginning Monday, ICE will begin “Operation Horizon,” the plan to process and deport those who had been allowed into the nation’s interior due to limited resources amid a migrant surge.
In accordance with Operation Horizon, ICE will mail “notices to appear” and other documents to the migrants, instructing them to present themselves at court hearings before immigration judges, who will then determine whether the new arrivals will be allowed to stay in the country, the sources said.
Generally, illegal aliens who are not immediately deported or held in detention are released and provided with notices to appear. But in March, immigration officers stopped serving migrants with these notices in light of strained resources.
Instead, ICE gave these illegal aliens “notices to report,” which are less formal than notices to appear and do not start an official court proceeding. These informal notices tell migrants to show up at their closest ICE office within a 60-day period.
Per CNBC, “as of September, CBP had released over 107,000 migrants with notices to report rather than formal notices to appear in court.” But the agency stated that nearly 28 percent of the migrants did not report to ICE within the allotted 60 days.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is mailing charging documents to place noncitizens in removal proceedings who have been paroled or released under prosecutorial discretion by Customs and Border Protection (CBP),” ICE told CBS. “Noncitizens are being directed to their closest ICE Field Office and will be processed using the information collected by CBP as evidence of citizenship and removability.”
When the migrants arrive at the ICE facility, agents will review migrants’ case files, collect fingerprints, take photos, and “determine whether migrants will be fitted with ankle bracelets or enrolled in other programs designed to ensure their compliance with reporting requirements.”
ICE vowed to enact sanctions against those who do not comply with the agency.
To stop their deportation cases, migrants can ask judges to grant them asylum or other forms of relief. Should their applications be denied, they can be deported or appeal the judge’s decision. America’s immigration courts currently have a backlog of over 1.4 million pending cases, per researchers at Syracuse University.
The U.S. Border Patrol has already surpassed the total number of migrant apprehensions made in any year along the southwest border since the agency’s creation in 1924. According to a source, the figure has reached 1,646,000 for the year.
ICE’s ability to process and deport illegal aliens could be hampered by the federal government’s employee vaccine mandate.
According to an internal report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), more than half of Border Patrol personnel may be terminated for failure to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This would leave just 8,000 officers on duty.
The report notes that “in the worst-case scenario, agents who have not reported their status have done so because they refuse to take the jab, and so they will be terminated (scenario 3). In that case, net attrition could exceed 11,523 agents, leaving a mere 8,013 border agents on patrol.”
If the approximately 10,000 Border Patrol agents who have yet to register their vaccination status do not do so this week, they will be offered counseling, then suspension, then termination.
Meanwhile, the Biden White House has been flying illegal aliens from the border into the interior of the country to places such as Jacksonville, Florida — a move Governor RonDeSantis said he will combat, including by denying state contracts to companies that help transport the migrants around after they land.
“We can obviously deny them state contracts, which we will do. Can we deny them access to Florida’s market generally? Can we tax them? Can we do things to provide disincentives so they can’t do it? So we’re going to do whatever we can to do it,” the governor said.
