Napolitano Says DHS Will Begin Dropping Deportation Cases Against Illegal Immigrants In Next Few Weeks
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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Wednesday that the Obama administration’s plan to drop some pending deportation cases will get under way in the next few weeks at selected sites across the country.
“The pilot will start in a few weeks, two to three weeks,” Napolitano said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “It will be very short and it’s designed to find logistical issues that happen where you’re trying to do a massive review of a lot of cases at the same time.”
Napolitano said the review, announced in August, is intended to “administratively close some of the low-priority cases.” She did not identify the districts where the review would begin, but she said it would be expanded nationwide as soon as the initial effort can be assessed.
Napolitano defended the effort to refocus immigration enforcement on priority cases, such as convicted criminals and recent border-crossers, as logical and similar to directives prior administrations issued to set priorities for deportation. On Tuesday, DHS released statistics showing some progress towards implementing the new priorities, but that a lot of deportees have minor criminal records that are supposed to make them a lower priority for deportation under the announced policy.
“Any prosecution office has finite resources and you have to set priorities,” Napolitano said. “The Congress gives us the resources to remove 400,000 [illegal immigrants each year.] The question is who are we going to prioritize.”
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