In the United States today, there are over 660,000 illegal aliens with pending criminal charges for crimes other than just crossing the border illegally. By all law and logic, they should be behind bars. Instead, they are allowed to roam free throughout the country, putting all the risk of their future misbehavior on American communities and not their own countries. Of those 660,000, about two-thirds—435,000—are already convicted criminals, including 13,000 convicted murderers.

Most of these aliens are among the roughly 1.3 million who have been ordered deported by an immigration court. They already had their criminal due process, and after a separate immigration process to determine whether they would be allowed to stay in the United States, they got a so-called final order of removal from an immigration judge. Legally we can, and morally we should, send them home forthwith.

Why are these people—many of whom will surely reoffend—still here? One reason is that the Biden-Harris administration has been purposefully lax at  enforcing our immigration laws in the nation’s interior.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said early in President Joe Biden’s term that an alien just being here illegally wasn’t reason enough for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to try and deport them (although it absolutely is). Mayorkas sent a notorious memo to ICE in 2021 ordering this approach and saddling officers with onerous paperwork and limits on where and how they could take action.

That’s much of the reason all the criminal aliens are still here, but that’s not all. Another reason is that some countries refuse to take back their people. The United States and other responsible countries take back their citizens from anywhere in the world, no matter how serious their crimes. But countries like China, India, and Venezuela say, “No, we won’t take our people back. They’re your problem now.”

These countries play various tricks to pass on their problems to us. Let’s say a Chinese illegal immigrant is caught committing armed robbery, is convicted, and serves a 10-year sentence. At the end of it, the prison informs ICE, which picks the convict up and puts him in immigration detention. If the alien has a final order for removal, ICE still has to get him home. If he doesn’t have a passport or confirmation of nationality, ICE needs a consular officer from the alien’s home country to come and verify the ex-con’s citizenship.

Countries can flatly refuse to help or deny that an alien is one of its own. Or they claim they don’t have staff to handle the processing and then delay so long that ICE has to let the alien free in the United States. According to some court decisions over the years, ICE can only detain an alien when they have a reasonable chance of deporting them, and even then, only for a limited period.

ICE labels countries that refuse or delay taking back their people “recalcitrant.” Back in 2016, there was a list of about a dozen such countries, and a longer list of those “at risk of noncompliance.” ICE would work with the State Department through diplomatic means to try and get recalcitrant countries to take their people back. From 2016-2017, I was the State Department’s coordinator on this.

One tool we had was visa sanctions. When a country “denies or unreasonably delays accepting an alien who is a citizen,” U.S. law says the State Department can stop issuing visas for its citizens to enter the U.S. This can start with not letting their leaders’ families go to Disney World and can ratchet all the way up to banning visas to that country altogether. It’s amazingly effective.

Using visa sanctions, the U.S. made significant progress on getting recalcitrant countries to change their minds. The first country we acted on was the tiny African state of The Gambia. It wasn’t chosen because of its size or location, but because it had only 11 convicted criminal aliens it wouldn’t take back. First, the U.S. informed The Gambia that due to its refusal to cooperate, our embassy would stop issuing visas to Gambian officials and their families.

The message was clear: If that didn’t work, we’d move on to larger and larger groups of Gambians. A few weeks later, the Gambian government authorized and accepted the repatriation of the 11 Gambian nationals who were subject to final orders of removal from the United States—and it requested that we remove the visa sanctions.

From The Gambia, the U.S. moved up the recalcitrant list, taking on Eritrea, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, and then much harder nuts like Cambodia. By the end of the Trump administration, the U.S. was going after even the really big offenders—China, India, and Russia—to take back their criminals. China and India each had about 20,000 convicted criminal citizens living illegally in the United States at the time.

For a while, there was a will, and a way, and it worked. So, what happened?

From the start, the Biden administration immediately made it easier to enter the U.S. illegally and stay by reversing all the policies that previous presidents used to control illegal entry at the border. The corollary to the administration’s open-borders approach was to severely curtail interior enforcement—and to stop pressuring foreign countries to take back their people.

The last list of recalcitrant countries published by ICE was in 2020. The agency’s visa sanctions webpage hasn’t really changed in four years. Because of that lack of updated information, members of Congress wrote to Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in July asking what countries the Department of Homeland Security considered recalcitrant.

As of now, Mayorkas has not replied. But sources tell me that China, Cuba, India, and Pakistan are still on the list. India is so desperate for U.S. visas that suspending the issuance of H1B work visas alone would bring them around—but has the Biden team threatened them with sanctions? Fat chance.

If any diplomatic pressure is being applied by the Biden-Harris administration on recalcitrant countries, it’s been well hidden. More likely, the administration abandoned the effort, judging by the low number of deportations each year and by DHS letting in millions of unscreened aliens from all over the world, including from many recalcitrant countries.

The Biden-Harris administration wants us to believe that there is nothing it can do to prevent any illegal aliens, even including violent members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, from entering the U.S. Then, when those thugs murder, rape, and rob Americans, it wants us to believe there is nothing it can do to send them back home.

Don’t believe it. Visa sanctions are one tool, but there are plenty of others, and we should be using them. America should use all possible diplomatic, economic, and legal pressure to induce countries like Venezuela, China, and others to do their duty and take back their criminals.

Removing dangerous felons who are illegally present in our country is the government’s basic duty to its citizens. Violent crime rates have already risen across America during the past few years, as newly corrected FBI data shows. The White House should stop making excuses and immediately re-implement visa sanctions as a simple and effective solution to reduce the population of alien convicts and restore some sense of law and order in this nation.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

Biden Administration Gives Panama ‘Jack’ to Help Control Border

What I Saw on My Visit to Springfield, Ohio

‘The BorderLine’ Anniversary Column: Revisiting Biden’s Border by the Numbers One Year Later

That Bipartisan Border Bill Harris Blames Trump for Killing Would Codify Illegal Immigration Crisis Into Law

The Stunning Costs of Biden-Harris’ ‘America-Last’ Border Policies—Part 2