Federal Govt Masks Full Costs of Illegal Immigrant Surge

By News-Max

Illegal immigrants who have entered the United States at the southern border have been resettled across the United States, but the federal government is not releasing the full costs associated with housing them, Breitbart reported.

The news outlet discovered that a Freedom of Information Act request from a pro-security group about the specific costs of housing, detaining and resettling the immigrants has been stonewalled.

• The costs of building family detention centers
• The costs of apprehending, processing and detaining unaccompanied minors
• The costs of transporting, transferring, removing and repatriating unaccompanied minors
• The costs related to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency's representation of the government in removal procedures involving unaccompanied minors
• The number of instances where objections to the return of unaccompanied minors were raised by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

According to Breitbart, the federal agency refused to answer a number of the questions and provided only partial answers to two of the five requests: the costs of transporting, transferring and removing illegal minors, and the costs of employing people to carry it out
Those costs alone totaled $58.2 million — or four times the cost of the previous year.

"The failure to provide most of the cost information related to the surge of [unaccompanied minors] indicates that the government has either failed to properly document those costs, or is refusing to reveal them," FAIR said, according to Breitbart.

The full costs for the illegal immigrants do not take into account the costs incurred by the Department of Health and Human Services or the public education system.

"[The costs] for providing shelter, food, education, healthcare and other services likely vastly exceed additional costs incurred by ICE," FAIR said, according to Breitbart.