Judiciary Republicans Demand Answers From Napolitano over -Backdoor Amnesty- Memos

WASHINGTON, D.C. Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee today sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano demanding more information regarding the Backdoor Amnesty memos circulating at the department she heads. Several of us have written to you previously about a USCIS memorandum entitled ˜Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the senators wrote. We now understand that an additional memorandum, which laid out some of the same proposals for granting immigration benefits to illegal immigrants¦ and which contained extensive discussions of the political considerations for such actions, was prepared at DHS headquarters for your review earlier this year. Over the course of the year, memoranda drafted by senior staff at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have surfaced that detail options to circumvent Congress and legalize those who are in the United States illegally. Secretary Napolitano has responded to earlier inquiries by stating a previous memorandum was an internal draft that was intended to simply raise the best ideas of DHS employees. But with another memorandum emerging earlier this month, the senators arent convinced. Your assurances do little to assuage our concerns about repeated references in the memoranda to find other ways, on an administrative level, to make most illegal immigrants in the country legal, they continued. The letter also expresses concerns that DHS, specifically the leadership of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is not adequately executing current immigration enforcement laws. Last month, for example, ICE decided to prohibit state and local law enforcement from taking illegal aliens into custody when they are stopped, but not arrested, for a traffic violation. More recently, ICE has proposed new guidance that would effectively require state and local authorities to release illegal aliens if the aliens only violation is his or her illegal status¦ We are concerned that, as a result of such policies, illegal immigrants who are being transported through border states and are apprehended by ICE or local authorities would be released into local communities, rather than detained by ICE. U.S. Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) signed the letter.