DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano suggested in an interview Thursday that immigration officials’ recent announcement that they were releasing several hundred detainees ahead of sequester cuts may have been better timed.
“Do I wish that this all hadn’t been done all of a sudden and so that people weren’t surprised by it? Of course,” she told ABC News. Napolitano added that she was not part of the decision by ICE to free the detainees.
“Detainee populations and how that is managed back and forth is really handled by career officials in the field,” she said.
Republican lawmakers are demanding Napolitano provide more information as to how the decision by ICE came about and which immigrants were released as a result, citing concerns that criminals may have been among them. Many detainees have no criminal record and are being held in accordance with unrelated deportation proceedings and Napolitano said officials were looking into why the affected detainees were being held.
Nonetheless, she said cuts to immigration enforcement and border security were inevitable given the sequester.
“We are always going to put safety first, and that’s why we’re not going to be abbreviating our safety procedures or any of that,” Napolitano said. “But, by way of example, the number of Border Patrol hours that will need to be reduced equates to the equivalent of 5,000 Border Patrol agents.”
