How can the federal government secure the border when it can’t even keep convicted murderers behind bars?

In what a Texas congressman calls “The worst prison break in American history,” a government report revealed that 124 illegal alien criminals that have been released from custody since 2010 by the Obama administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were later charged with 135 new homicides.

Two of them even had homicide-related convictions before they were released to the public, the Center for Immigration Studies report disclosed.

ICE issued its report in response to Senate Judiciary Committee requests, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which reported:

Only a tiny percentage of the released criminals have been removed — most receive the most generous forms of due process available, and are allowed to remain at large, without supervision, while they await drawn-out immigration hearings. They are permitted to take advantage of this inefficient processing even though they are more likely to re-offend than they are to be granted legal status.

There is a human cost to the Obama administration’s careless catch and release policies for criminal aliens, euphemistically known as “prioritization”. These policies have led to 124 new homicides since 2010, and thousands of other crimes that harm citizens and degrade the quality of life in American communities.

 

In addition, the numbers provided to Congress by ICE officials didn’t include those criminal illegal aliens released by sanctuary jurisdictions. Nor did the figures include those released by local law enforcement agencies when ICE declined to take them.

ICE officials also reported that they released 156 criminal illegal aliens multiple times since 2013 who had a combined total of 1,776 convictions before their first release.

Even before this new data were made public, Rep. Lamar Smith likened ICE’s “catch and release” program to a prison break.

“This would be considered the worst prison break in American history, except it was sanctioned by the President and perpetrated by our own immigration officials,” the Texas Republican said in a statement. “These criminal immigrants should have been deported to ensure that they could never commit crimes on U.S. soil. But instead, ICE officials chose not to detain them and instead released them back onto American streets.”

Watch the report via the Washington Examiner.