Subcommittee Chairman McClintock Opening Statement Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement

Opening Statement of 
Rep. Tom McClintock
The Consequences of Criminal Aliens on U.S. Communities 
Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
Thursday, July 13, 2023

Yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the open Southern border poses a huge security risk to our nation – his words – and that they have tracked a significant increase in crime, criminal cartel activity and gang-related cartels because of this crisis.  

More than 5.5 million illegal aliens have been encountered at the southwest border since Joe Biden became President. Over 2.1 million illegal aliens at the border have been released into the U.S. in that same period of time. And more than 1.5 million known gotaways have evaded law enforcement and entered the country since January 2021.

Among the 1.5 million known gotaways, there is no way to estimate the number of terrorists and criminals entering the country.  But we do know this: by surrendering to border patrol you are virtually assured of being released into the country.  The 1.5 million who have evaded border patrol have done so for a reason: they are either conducting criminal activity or are hiding criminal records.

Adding to this threat is the fact that the administration has essentially adopted the sanctuary policies that prevent many dangerous illegal aliens from being deported after they have been convicted and incarcerated for committing crimes while in the Unites States.  According to Mr. Mayorkas’ enforcement priorities : “Whether a noncitizen poses a current threat to public safety is not to be determined according to bright lines or categories.” The result of such “prioritization” is that few criminal aliens are arrested and removed. 

The numbers speak for themselves:

•    In fiscal year 2020 – the last year of the Trump administration -- ICE removed 186,000 aliens from the United States. Two years into the Biden Administration, deportations have plunged to only 72,000 – a decline of more than 60 percent.  
•    The Trump Administration removed 104,000 convicted criminals from the country in fiscal year 2020, yet the Biden Administration only removed 38,000 in fiscal year 2022.  That requires repeating.  The number of convicted criminal aliens removed from our country has declined by nearly two-thirds under this administration.  
•    Similarly, in 2022, the Biden Administration removed just 60 percent of the number of known or suspected gang members as the Trump Administration did just two years earlier.

Explain to me how this make our communities safer?   Does anyone seriously believe that making it harder to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities makes those communities safer?  Many of these aliens arrive deeply indebted to the cartels whose affiliated gangs follow them into our communities to enforce those debts – often by pressing them into drug trafficking and human trafficking.  A cartel massacre of an entire family just hit Tulare, California, a rural community not far from my district. 

The cartels are here because we have let them in.  And as Director Wray testified yesterday, we have no idea how many terrorists have now entered the country as well.

But these aren’t just statistics.    Every crime devastates the victims of it, as we will hear today.

•    The sexual assault of a three-year-old at a Chicago McDonald’s;
•    The sexual assault and murder of a 92-year-old woman in Queens, New York;
•    The murder of a college student in Iowa;
•    The sexual assault and murder of a 20-year-old girl in Maryland;
•    The assault of a teenage girl in Alabama;
•    The assault and robbery of two friends at a Maryland park;
•    The attempted abduction of a 4-year-old girl in Virginia;
•    The murder of a 15-year-old boy in Maryland.

 These Democratic policies might create sanctuaries for criminal illegal aliens, but they are creating a dystopian nightmare for law-abiding citizens and non-citizens alike who must live in them. 

 And we now have a new phenomenon: crime tourism.  In the past several years, criminal gangs, largely from Chile, have exploited the Visa Waiver Program to shake once-quiet communities across the United States. With multimillion-dollar heists from southern California to Florida and burglaries of family homes from New York to Virginia, these criminal aliens continue their crime sprees across the country. And in sanctuary jurisdictions, they largely escape accountability.

Today, our witnesses will describe these real-life, everyday consequences of crimes that would not occur at all save for the fact that we are not enforcing our immigration laws.  If we simply enforced those laws, there would be fewer criminal aliens in the country, and fewer crimes committed by them.  It is that simple.