The Obama administration took fire at a House hearing Thursday for releasing back into society thousands of illegal immigrants who had committed crimes on U.S. soil – including those behind more than 200 murders.
(FOX)- “These are people that were here illegally, got caught committing a crime, were convicted of that crime and instead of deporting them, they were just released back out in the United States of America,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said.
According to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2015 “freed 19,723 criminal aliens, who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them.”
This included “8,234 violent convictions and 208 homicide convictions.”
ICE Director Sarah Saldana defended her agency, even characterizing the statistics as an improvement while claiming they were being politically manipulated.
“I can’t tell you how disheartening it is to hear a very important issue being bandied about as a political football,” Saldana said. “I would ask we focus on solutions rather than political banter.”
Saldana described the number of releases in 2015 as an improvement over prior years. The agency also made modest gains in detaining illegal immigrants but still released nearly 20,000 criminal offenders last year who had been convicted of crimes ranging from arson to embezzlement to sexual assault, according to the CIS report.