According to a new Fox Digital report, 1.4 million illegal immigrants with deportation orders are still in the U.S. under the immigration policies of President Joe Biden, even as recent reports of migrants murdering Americans have many communities on edge.
The number of deportees is less than half of the total number of estimated illegal immigrants in the country, which is 11.7 million.
"It took decades of neglect and bad public policy, coupled with four years of unprecedented illegal immigration, to get here," director of research for the Center of Immigration Studies Steven Camarota told Fox News Digital. "You can't reverse it in four years."
Former Border Patrol Council head Brandon Judd said the number doesn't come as a surprise.
"We've known this forever," he said. "I've been on record many times saying that once somebody gets here, they're never going to leave this country. And the reason is, is because the vast majority of them won't show up [for their court date]."
Judd said that most migrants who aren't in detention get notified of their deportation via letter and are not arrested.
"We have addresses, we have places of work – we have information about them," he said.
"How do you have the immigration system that has judges go through this whole procedure and then most of the people they say ‘No’ to are not made to go home?" Camarota continued.
The Biden administration isn't working too hard to pursue them when they don't show up to court either, he said.
The incoming Donald Trump administration has said mass deportations are coming, but has given few details about how they will be accomplished other than sending many more Border Patrol agents into the field from their current desk duty.
Last week, the border state of Texas offered to give 1,400 acres of land to the Trump administration to stage its efforts to deport many of the illegal immigrants who have flooded the border under Biden.
The land is in Starr County, in the Rio Grande sector near the border, making it suitable for detaining migrants before they are sent back to where they came from.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered the land in a letter to the Trump administration, saying the state was "fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the United States Border Patrol to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history."
The land was purchased to continue a border wall, but that effort was stopped by the Biden administration when he took office in 2021.
