The Biden administration is being sued by Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall for ignoring immigration law “that requires the federal government to arrest, detain and deport foreign nationals in the U.S. illegally” , reports Just the News.
The Republican attorneys general of Florida and Georgia also joined the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The lawsuit declares the administration’s immigration policy exceeds the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, is arbitrary and capricious, illegally bypassed notice and public commenting, and is unconstitutional.
“The Biden administration cannot ignore the law, nor should it place American lives in jeopardy by allowing criminal aliens to escape the long arm of justice,” Marshall said in a statement.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Chris Magnus, Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tae Johnson, Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) Ur Jaddou, their respective agencies, and the federal government are named as defendants.
“For more than three decades, a bipartisan majority of Congress has made law that the Executive Branch should arrest, detain, and remove all felon criminal aliens,” Marshall said. “Congress was justifiably concerned that deportable criminal aliens who are not detained continue to engage in crime and fail to appear for their removal proceedings in large numbers.”
“Congress intended that those arrested and ordered removed by an immigration judge were actually deported,” he added. “What’s more, officials in previous administrations of both political parties have agreed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has to prioritize the removal of criminal aliens, and the United States Supreme Court has held that immigration officials ‘must arrest those aliens guilty of a predicate offense.’”
“President Biden has reversed course, effectively thumbing his nose at federal law, slow-walking or outright ignoring legal requirements for detention and deportation of criminal aliens,” Marshall said.
According to the complaint, the states of the attorneys general collectively spend more than $100 million a year “incarcerating aliens who commit crimes within our borders. We will spend even more because of the criminals the Biden administration is releasing instead of arresting, detaining and removing, especially given the high recidivism rates among released prisoners.”