In September 2022, when Jose Antonio Ibarra from Venezuela first entered the country near El Paso, Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had approximately 8,100 detention beds available. ICE released Ibarra into the interior of the United States rather than keeping him in its available jail capacity.
In Athens, Georgia, authorities accused Ibarra of the murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley a year and a half later.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), stated during a Senate hearing on Thursday that Ibarra’s release into the American interior was appropriate because the agency had no justification for holding him, despite the fact that thousands of ICE detention beds were available at the time of his release.
“We were not aware of any negative information in our records that would have required this person’s incarceration,” Mayorkas stated to Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), the ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
President Joe Biden’s DHS made a different example public this week, allowing 48-year-old Afghani Mohammad Kharwin to enter the American interior in March 2023. According to ICE data, there were roughly 7,000 detention beds available at the time of his release.
A further investigation revealed that Kharwin was on the federal government’s “Terrorist Watch List” and belonged to the terrorist organization Hezb-e-Islami.
According to experts consulted by Breitbart News, the Biden administration has consistently worked to eliminate ICE custody in favor of a mass border release program that even eliminates post-release surveillance for migrants.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Democrats proposed legislation that would have funded 41,500 ICE detention beds; however, Biden’s most recent budget request for Fiscal Year 2025, which Mayorkas is proposing, calls for just 34,000 ICE detention beds. This is significantly fewer than the 50,000 detention beds that the administration agreed to accept.
Biden and Mayorkas only consented to the 50,000 detention beds in the Lankford bill because the provision was “in exchange for codification of crisis levels and millions for non-governmental organizations and sanctuary jurisdictions,” according to RJ Hauman of the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE), who spoke with Breitbart News.
Hauman referred to the Lankford measure as “a mass-migration extortion attempt” and claimed that the Biden administration’s attempt to drastically cut the number of detention beds in its most recent funding request “proves that the Senate saga was nothing more than a political charade.”
