They’re leaving on a jet plane, sometimes on private jets, with plush first-class type seats, abundant leg room, and other amenities usually reserved for CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations.
In total, the trips are costing you, the taxpayer, a cool $300,000.
So which V.I.P.s are being transported, sometimes in the lap of luxury, on your dime? Prepare for blood to shoot out of your eyes. The recipients of this U.S. hospitality are illegal immigrants who have been deported and are being returned to their homelands … or in some cases the nearest airport.
The news gets worse. According to the Daily Mail:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spent $116m in 2015 to transport 235,413 people in the United States illegally back to their home countries.
More than 40 per cent of those who had violated visa restrictions were convicted criminals while more than 1,000 were identified as gang members. [Emphasis added]
[…]
The ICE revealed to Daily Mail Online that the average cost of every immigrant in 2015 was $12,213.
The article notes that travel by air is reserved for those illegals who need to be taken abroad, though it’s still unclear why the financial responsibility for their return has to be shouldered by the American taxpayer.
When the deportees are considered high-risk, they are ferried home on private jets, such as a Gulfstream IV. To date there have been 34 such charters.
At one point [ICE] hired a a long-range, twin engine commercial jet that seats 261 passengers to take a single illegal immigrant to Nigeria.
The article quotes David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, as calling the arrangement “insane,” adding:
This is an outrageous and unacceptable waste of tax dollars. There is absolutely zero justification for spending this amount of money deporting immigrants.
DHS needs to find a more efficient way to do this. Somebody at DHS should be held accountable for this.
This type of wasteful spending is why the American people have such a high level of skepticism and cynicism about government.
Leave it to the government to take a relatively simple task and make it complicated and expensive.
