Two days after hundreds of detained immigrants held at detention facilities nationwide were released due to pending spending cuts, both Homeland Security Department and White House officials said they were not made aware of the decision to set those immigrants free.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told the press at a news briefing Wednesday that the decision to release detained immigrants earlier this week was made by Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials "without any input from the White House," CNN reports.
"The agency released these low-risk, non-criminal detainees under a less-expensive form of monitoring to ensure detention levels stayed within ICE's overall budget," he said.
The agency, which enforces the nation's immigration laws, released immigrants from detention facilities in order to save money because they could no longer afford to hold them at detention centers due to the looming budget sequester cuts that are scheduled to take place Friday. While those released were not deemed a risk to public safety, ICE placed them on supervision and the freed detainees are scheduled to return to court for their pending immigration cases.
Gillian Christensen, a spokesperson for customs enforcement, said that the agency reviewed the cases during the course of a week.
Republicans such as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, were furious regarding the decision, Rep. Boehner calling it "outrageous" in an interview with CBS Evening News on Tuesday.
"This is very hard for me to believe that they can't find cuts elsewhere in their agency. I frankly think this is outrageous and I'm looking for more facts but I can't believe that they can't find the kind of savings they need out of the department short of letting criminals go free," Boehner said.
Some legislators have been accusing the Obama administration of releasing the undocumented immigrants held in detention centers as a way to scare the public regarding the sequester cuts Friday, which administration has denied.
Boehner further accused the Obama administration of "trying to play games - play games with the American people, scare the American people. This is not, this is not leadership."
U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, blasted ICE in a letter it sent to the agency, stating that the decision to release the detained immigrants "reflects the lack of resource prioritization within the Department of Homeland Security" and ICE. Furthermore, Rep. McCaul gave the agency until March 6 to identify how many immigrants have been identified for release and where they will be released, among other details, Fox News reports.
This development comes at a crucial time in the ongoing debate regarding changing the immigration laws in the country to allow undocumented immigrants to eventually become U.S. citizens while strengthening border security.
In the past month, both President Obama and the bipartisan Democrat and Republican group known as the "Gang of Eight" have released plans that offer conditional pathways to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants residing in the nation's borders.
President Obama met with two Republicans from that panel, U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Tuesday to discuss the group's current efforts to bring an immigration bill before Congress this year, which ended with positive remarks from both Sens. McCain and Graham regarding President Obama.
However, U.S. Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested that President Obama should stay away from the process and that Congress would be better served creating a guest worker program and a path to "legal status" for immigrants--not citizenship.
"We should focus on common ground on legal status," Rep. Goodlatte told the press at a breakfast Wednesday morning sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. "Once you have that status, you can qualify like everyone else."
"There are large number of people here unlawfully," Rep. Goodlatte added. "It's not a good thing to have them operating in the shadows."