(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) With new horrors and atrocities emerging daily along President Joe Biden’s open borders, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has predicted that they will run out of money by October unless the Department of Homeland Security grants them additional funding.
According to the Western Journal, the massive surge of migrants crossing the southern border have driven up costs. ICE has been controversial since its founding, as its primary role is to arrest and detain illegal aliens.
Since the start of the Biden administration, ICE has been spending record amounts of money reacting to the increased border crisis. Currently, ICE has an estimated $345 million shortfall for the current fiscal year.
DHS will have to move around funds, taking from other agencies, in order to keep funding ICE, reported Axios. About $100 million is expected to come from the Cost Guard budget, while another $80 million could be found by moving around existing ICE funds internally.
Meanwhile, record numbers of immigrants have been crossing into the U.S. via the southern border. In 2021, U.S. Customs and Border protection reported more than 2 million migrant encounters.
That does not count the number of immigrants who have crossed the border undetected. The numbers for the first half of 2022 have continued to increase.
As cases continue to skyrocket, so does the cost of operations for all agencies attempting to deal with the issue. Since the creation of DHS in 2003, the federal government has spent about $333 billion on agencies that carry out immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council.
Many, including ICE Chief of Staff Jon Feere, believe that there is not enough money, especially because ICE and DHS have been shifting operations.
Blaming the Biden administration, Feere explained that it has been using taxpayer money to find “alternatives to detention,” rather than using normal detention and immigration enforcement.
“Instead of seeking enforcement resources, the Biden administration is putting more money into so-called alternatives to setention, but more specifically into what they call ‘case management’ and ‘wraparound services,’ which means endless taxpayer handouts for illegal aliens,” Feere told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“There’s no money for this, so the Biden administration is transferring taxpayer dollars from other parts of DHS like the U.S. Coast Guard and FEMA,” he said.
“Biden’s political appointees are transforming ICE from a law enforcement agency into a social services agency without Congress’s permission.”
