Federal Watchdog Outlines Raft of Problems With Immigration Enforcement

Published on June 21, 2024

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is failing to enforce immigration laws, the agency’s inspector general said in three new reports. Hundreds of individuals discovered to be illegally in the United States at an international airport were released due to a lack of bed space at local facilities or insufficient funds for immigration officers to detain them at the airport, according to one of the documents. From Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2023, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released at least 383 of these individuals due to these problems, investigators with the DHS Office of Inspector General found. Of those, 44 percent did not return to the airport for flights back to their home countries....