(THE CENTER SQUARE) – Immigrants convicted of dangerous felonies who have lost their last appeal to remain in the U.S. face a stronger possibility of deportation after Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost won an injunction that forces the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to enforce the law.
Yost, along with attorneys general from Arizona and Montana, sued in November to enforce federal immigration law, and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio granted a preliminary injunction earlier this week.
Under the Biden administration, the DHS issued a new interior immigration enforcement policy, which Yost said ignored Congress and resulted in the deportation of only a tiny fraction of the people mandated by federal law.
"The DHS policy leaves dangerous criminals on our streets who are supposed to be deported under the law," Yost said. "It went further and completely ignored the final deportation orders of immigration courts."
Yost also said in a news release DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas bragged about the department's policy to CBS News in January.
"We have fundamentally changed immigration enforcement in the interior," Mayorkas said then. "For the first time ever, our policy explicitly states that a noncitizen's unlawful presence in the U.S. will not, by itself, be a basis for the initiation of an enforcement action."
Yost slammed the comments.
"Bureaucrats don't get to 'fundamentally change' the law," Yost said. "Today, the court changed it back."
Yost also said deportations fell to 59,011 in fiscal year 2021, down from 185,884 in fiscal year 2020, according to the annual report released last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The report also stated ICE officers made 36,619 administrative arrests of convicted criminals last fiscal year, compared with 123,128 the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
