Washington, D.C. (March 15, 2022) — The Biden administration continues to hide a critical report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that has been released by the end of each calendar year for at least the last decade — with the exception of last year. Known as the “Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Report”, it contains detailed tables on ICE arrests, detainers, removals, and criminal statistics that are critical for comparing the agency’s performance to prior years. Though the Biden administration recently allowed ICE to
publish a congressionally-required report on ICE’s broad responsibilities, that report is not the missing enforcement-focused report. (The ERO Enforcement Report for Fiscal Year 2020 is
available online).
“The recently released report is a narrative-driven document that includes only a handful of enforcement-related statistics, all of which are intentionally written in a manner that is difficult to analyze and compare to previous years,” writes Jon Feere, the Center’s Director of Investigations and former ICE Chief of Staff.
Members of Congress and reporters have been asking for months why the Enforcement Report for Fiscal Year 2021 is being hidden by the Biden administration. The still-unreleased report includes numerous tables and charts, year-over-year and monthly comparisons, and important numerical data — from detainers issued to criminality of aliens arrested to the number of arrests made in the interior of the United States compared to custody-transfer arrests from Border Patrol apprehensions — and would allow for a complete picture of the impact of the Biden administration’s controversial immigration policies.
Last October, ICE field office directors sent the enforcement data to ICE headquarters as part of their job responsibilities and the political leadership has been sitting on it ever since. The Center has learned that the Biden White House took control of the draft report, rewrote it, and returned it to officers within ICE, hoping they would sign off on the new draft; the officers did not sign off, explaining that they would be unable to defend what they viewed as a politicized report that intentionally misrepresented the results of the White House’s policies.
Feere writes, “This lack of transparency is consistent with the Biden administration’s secretive approach on immigration. ICE has not held one public press event on immigration since the administration started in January 2021. The release of the recent ICE report was ICE’s first immigration-focused event and it was a closed-door, media-only conference call.”
