The U.S. government is increasingly utilizing a program that releases illegal immigrants into the U.S. interior instead of keeping them detained until their court hearings, according to a new watchdog report.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program is formally known as Alternatives to Detention and colloquially known as “catch and release.”
While federal law requires the U.S. government to detain illegal immigrants until they have a court hearing, the government says it does not have the capacity to do so, and has since 2004 been releasing a portion of those captured at the border under the program.
In 2015, ICE enrolled 53,000 illegal immigrants in the program, which uses monitoring tools like GPS ankle bracelets. By 2020, that figure jumped to 111,000, according to a new report (pdf) from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) that analyzed data from contractors paid to help to run the program….