Acting United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ken Cuccinelli says the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is ready to deport about a million illegal aliens who remain in the country despite having final orders for deportation.
During an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Cuccinelli said despite a delay of mass deportations by President Trump two weeks ago, ICE agents are ready to detain and deport the roughly one million illegal aliens who have been ordered deported from the country.
Cuccinelli said:
[ICE agents are] ready to just perform their mission which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort or not is really just information kept within ICE.
Cuccinelli said mass deportations by ICE of illegal aliens with final deportation orders “should be going on on a rolling basis” and blamed “the politics of Washington” for interfering with ICE operations.
“I’m just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous,” Cuccinelli said. “It’s important to note, here we are talking about ICE doing its job as if it’s special. And really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ICE and they’ve been interfered with, effectively, and held up by the politics of Washington to a certain extent…”
Trump, last month, delayed a plan by ICE to mass deport about 2,000 illegal aliens who had final deportation orders after details of the operation were leaked to the media. Former ICE Director Thomas Homan accused Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan of leaking the plans of the ICE raid in order to halt the operation.
Though Trump gave Congress two weeks to devise a plan to close loopholes in the country’s asylum system — loopholes that have invited millions of border crossers to the U.S. over the last decade — no such plan has been crafted that would pass the House and Senate.
