Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lost track of at least 150,000 undocumented migrants in the summer of 2021 after the Biden administration relaxed its “no processing” immigration policy, according to an exclusive report by Fox News.
According to excerpts from ICE training videos from November 2021 to February 2022 first obtained by Fox News Digital, border patrol agents released hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants into the country without prior processing.
The training videos were discovered as part of an ongoing lawsuit by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody against the Department of Homeland Security and other border agencies.
ICE officials usually give undocumented migrants entering the U.S. charging documents, which allow authorities to process and locate them before they are released into the country.
However, due to a surge in migrants and a lack of resources at the border, border officials began releasing migrants into the country without handing them the formal charging documents in 2021. Instead, officials have the migrants instructions to report to the ICE office closest to their destination.
In November 2021, the Biden administration enacted “Operation Horizon,” which sought to locate over 150,000 migrants that had been released and send them their official charging documents.
However, the training videos show that border officials were unable to locate and remove several undocumented migrants because they didn’t have the information necessary to identify them.
"Operation Horizon, the background on this… you know over the summer, we had well over 150,000 folks come in," an ICE official can be heard saying in the video.
"They were issued a piece of paper that said, ‘go find somebody in ICE,’ and that was pretty much it. There was no processing. I know this isn’t something that you guys asked for, and I can assure you that no one in the criminal alien program asked for it either," he added.
“This process does not address the underlining challenges regarding ICE’s congressionally-mandated responsibility to locate, arrest and place into removal proceedings those noncitizens who are not in possession of a valid, unexpired entry document," another official added. "Under Operation Horizon, ICE law enforcement officers will identify, locate and place into removal proceedings those noncitizens who CBP released into the United States after March 15, 2021.”
According to Attorney General Moody, the video “evidence of President Joe Biden’s intentional destruction of the nation’s immigration system.”
"As our litigation uncovered, this has been this administration’s plan all along. They’ve let in and lost track of hundreds of thousands of inadmissible immigrants, and it is about to get worse. We will continue our litigation efforts to force Biden to follow the law and try to mitigate this national disaster," the Florida attorney general continued.
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