Immigrants who commit a major crime inside the U.S. are supposed to be returned to their home country after completing their prison sentence. But a number of countries are refusing to take back their own criminals, so Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE just turns them loose in U.S. communities, freeing them to return to their criminal lifestyle. We have a U.S. law that requires our State Department to impose visa sanctions on countries that refuse to take back their own criminals, but Obama’s State Department simply ignores this law in the name of “executive discretion.” Senators Jeff Sessions and Chuck Grassley have gotten ICE to admit the awful truth that “One hundred twenty-one convicted criminals who faced deportation orders between 2010 and 2014 were never removed from our country and now face murder charges for killing Americans.” Hundreds of other immigrants who were convicted of violent sex crimes, including depraved acts against children, were released into unsuspecting U.S. communities without being registered as sex offenders. The Boston Globe compiled a database of nearly a thousand immigrant sex fiends. This job was particularly difficult because ICE seems to care less about the safety of Americans than about the “privacy” of foreign criminals who should not even be in our country. The excuse given for these outrageous releases is a Supreme Court decision called Zadvydas, which held that persons awaiting deportation cannot be held indefinitely. That 2001 decision was accepted by the George W. Bush administration and led to the release of hundreds of violent criminal immigrants including the accused perpetrator of the infamous D.C. mansion murders, Darron Wint. The Obama administration needs to follow the law that is on our books and impose visa sanctions on countries that refuse to take back their violent criminals. This article originally appeared at Eagle Forum.
