DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Tennessee’s top prosecutor said Wednesday that his office uncovered a scheme by the Biden-Harris administration to release a massive number of illegal aliens into the state, but the plan ultimately was derailed.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, attempted to release illegal aliens into Tennessee, but those plans were scrapped following pushback from the governor and other lawmakers, according to documents obtained by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Federal immigration authorities had attempted to transport potentially thousands of single adult migrants from out-of-state detention facilities and release them into Tennessee in coordination with nonprofit groups, alleged Skrmetti, a Republican.
“The federal government’s single most important job is to keep dangerous people out of our country and instead it has let killers and rapists illegally cross our border and walk free on our streets,” Skrmetti said in a press release.
“While the urgent work to fix our broken immigration system continues in Washington, my office will keep fighting for transparency and accountability,” he said.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, learned in December 2022 that federal immigration authorities were coordinating with immigrant rights organizations and local officials in Nashville to release a massive number of ICE detainees into the state before the end of the Title 42 health order that helped keep border crossings down, according to the state attorney general’s press release.
When the federal government didn’t respond to a FOIA request, the attorney general’s office filed suit.
The email correspondence obtained by Skrmetti’s office seemingly reveals a plan to release thousands of single, adult detainees from ICE detention facilities into Tennessee, coordination between local nonprofit groups to carry out the plan, and ICE data showing the release of detainees from its Louisiana detention centers with violent criminal backgrounds such as murder, kidnapping. and rape.
ICE officials and the Nashville mayor’s office discussed logistics on the plan, such as how many asylum-seekers would be brought into the city, how many of them would want the city to be their final destination, and what level of support the federal government would be providing, email messages show. Organizations such as the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and Home Is Here NOLA were mentioned in the email correspondence.
Despite the fact that the plan to drop migrants off in Tennessee was derailed due to pushback from the governor and U.S. senators, Skrmetti’s office said, thousands of illegal aliens were still released from the Louisiana detention facilities, including dangerous individuals.
The attorney general’s press release says:
The information further reveals that although ICE abandoned its failed plan for the mass release of detainees into Tennessee, the agency nonetheless released over 7,000 detainees directly from its Louisiana facilities at that time, including more than 30 who were assigned ICE’s highest security-threat level. Released detainees had criminal records, including homicide, sexual assault, aggravated assault with a weapon, armed robbery, kidnapping, smuggling aliens, drug trafficking, burglary, and fraud.
The news follows unprecedented levels of illegal immigration into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration.
There were roughly 2.1 million migrant encounters along the southern border in fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30, according to the latest data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The latest figure puts the total number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden-Harris administration at roughly 8.5 million—which doesn’t include roughly half a million noncitizens flown into the country via the White House’s CHNV parole program.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
