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The Biden administration has appointed an anti-Immigration and Customs Enfrocement (ICE) activist, who advocates pulling funding from the agency, to scrutinize the detention of illegal immigrants.
Michelle Brané, who has called ICE’s activities “abusive” and wants to limit the agency’s powers of detention, began her tenure earlier this month as the immigration detention ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Brané has been outspoken in her stance, writing in one 2019 post on X that fees for immigration applications are used to “supplement ICE’s abusive enforcement.”
“ICE already gets billions of taxpayer money to detain asylum seekers. They do not need more,” Brané wrote.
When Trump’s ICE director said in 2017 “we shouldn’t wait” for illegal immigrants to commit crimes in order to deport them, Brané wrote on X his comments sound like those of “a police state to me.”
Read this thread about revised immigration application fees. Making victims of abuse most outrageous fees so they can supplement ICE’s abusive enforcement. ICE already gets billions of taxpayer money to detain asylum seekers. They do not need more. https://t.co/7PM318bWSD— Michelle Brané (@MichelleBrane) November 9, 2019
So many of their findings are right in line with what we @wrcommission have found when we monitor detention. ICE can not implement detention humanely. Time to use alternatives and stop using a prison model for civil immigration cases. https://t.co/tA175QSeGO— Michelle Brané (@MichelleBrane) December 14, 2017
Brané most recently served as DHS’ executive director for the department’s Family Reunification Task Force.
But given her previous statements about ICE enforcement and against detention, former ICE officials believe she’s unfit for her current role to audit such action.
DHS didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Jon Feere, who was ICE chief of staff during the Trump administration, told The Post Brané’s appointment is akin to “putting an arsonist in charge of conducting oversight of the US Forest Service.”
“My guess is that she’ll use her new authority to undermine ICE detention efforts, which will come in the form of excessive audits and releases of illegal aliens based on unsupported and phony complaints,” Feere said.
ICE has been ordered to perform more audits, inspecting one detention facility 92 times last year, the agency’s chief of staff, Michael Lumpkin, recently said.
“That’s ridiculous and certainly not intended to make things function more efficiently. But with an ombudsman who fundamentally opposes ICE’s and DHS’s mission, things will only get worse,” Feere claimed of the audits.
Former ICE field office director John Fabbricatore told The Post ICE’s decision to tap Brané for the role “raises critical questions about the direction and priorities of ICE under the current administration.”
“Ms. Brane’s previous assertions that efforts by ICE to preemptively arrest illegal aliens to prevent further crimes equate to a ‘police state’ underscores a problematic perspective for someone about to hold a significant position in a law enforcement agency,” Fabbricatore, who’s now running for Congress to represent Colorado’s sixth district, said.
“This isn’t the first hire at DHS that has raised concerns and there seems to be a growing number of activists and advocates of an open-border, anti-ICE philosophy.”
The Biden administration has heavily relied on its “Alternatives to Detention” program which keeps migrants from being physically detained for long periods of time as they await court dates to hear their asylum claims.
ICE data from April 6 showed more than 183,000 migrants were under the program through various forms of monitoring including by ankle or wrist monitor, through phone check-ins which use voice recognition or SmartLINK, where a migrant checks in via a cellphone app with facial recognition.
However, the program has faced recent scrutiny for prominent cases of migrants absconding including Diego Ibarra — an alleged member of the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua and brother of the migrant charged with murdering nursing student Laken Riley — and Leonel Moreno, the Venezuelan “migrant influencer” who urged others to “invade” the US and squat in citizens’ homes.
“We have so many [absconders], and since the majority of them are ‘non-criminals,’ they don’t qualify for enforcement action,” an ICE official told The Post, referring to a memo the Biden administration issued in September 2021 instructing immigration authorities not to track down and arrest those who skip out on the program.
