U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted that it has no records of nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants that are enrolled in its “Alternatives to Detention” program which allows illegal aliens to be let loose in the United States with an electronic tracking device.
A December 22 letter to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that ICE responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on the program, Daily Caller reported.
“ICE has conducted a search of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for records responsive to your request and no records responsive to your request were found,” wrote Brian Hearn, a supervisory paralegal specialist at the agency. TRAC assistant professor Austin Kocher shared the news on Twitter.
Just days after announcing that the agency had been misleading to the public for months about how many immigrants were on gps ankle monitors, @icegov claims it can’t find records on over 350,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention program.https://t.co/UVzYiyklLG pic.twitter.com/mAJKz9UfPw
— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) December 28, 2022
“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data,” he told the Daily Caller.
“The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” Kocher added.
The program was launched in 2004 to allow monitoring of migrants released in the US with tracking devices. The revelation comes after Congress has passed the end-of-year spending bill which included $20 million to the program, reports Fox News. The money for ICE’s botched program was included in the recently passed $1.7 trillion omnibus bill which only requires President Biden’s signature to come to fruition.
