We previously discussed the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Biden administration failed to release its congressionally mandated annual report on deportations of illegal aliens at the end of last year. That “oversight” has finally been corrected and the numbers give a good indication of why the administration probably didn’t feel like talking about them with the public. In 2021, deportations of illegal immigrants plunged to levels not seen since the Obama/Biden administration more than five years ago. Remarkably, this shift took place during the heat of the Biden border crisis, as new records for illegal border crossings were being set on a monthly basis. (Free Beacon)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported just 55,590 illegal immigrants in 2021, the fewest number in five years, according to a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The 2021 numbers represent a 70 percent decrease from 2020, when ICE deported 185,884. In 2019, ICE deported 267,258 migrants.

The numbers come from the 2021 ICE Annual Report, a critical overview of the agency’s work in the previous fiscal year. The report was released a month after the Free Beacon reported on the Biden administration’s efforts to keep the report from the public, which generated outrage from lawmakers.

To put this in perspective, illegal aliens have been streaming across the border for the past year in numbers that reached the tens of millions. The migrants were literally running into each other because the crowds were so large in some cases. The coyotes are probably all shopping for seaside mansions at this point. You would think that it would be pretty easy to identify and pick them up with that sort of traffic coming across the border.

That would almost certainly be true if we were actually trying to catch them and deport them. But that’s been the opposite of the Biden administration’s policies since the day he took office. And we’re talking about literally the day he was sworn in when he began issuing executive orders to weaken our border protection capabilities.

Even when ICE does manage to catch someone and process them with an order for deportation, the Biden administration frequently fights their own agents in court, often trying to have the deportation orders canceled. They even did that in the case of one illegal alien who had literally killed someone.

That’s not to say that illegal aliens haven’t been being removed from the border areas of Texas and Arizona on Biden’s watch. Plenty of them have been removed. But instead of sending them back to their country of origin, Biden has been quietly flying them all over the country and releasing them into the American interior, often without ever notifying local elected officials or law enforcement that it was happening.

Our immigration laws have not been repealed. Those laws are simply being ignored by the Biden immigration. In some cases, our immigration enforcement officials are being actively thwarted by the President and his team. They are not honoring their sworn oaths to enforce the laws of this country and maintain our border integrity to the best of their abilities. And everything they are doing is cloaked in secrecy, generally with the cooperation of a compliant mainstream media that shies away from asking uncomfortable questions when a Democrat is in office. The nation deserves better than this.