US Speaker Mike Johnson touts GOP wins on migrant detention in funding deal

This article is from Monday, but it has some background on ICE budget issues:

Congress, White House agree on spending but may still miss deadline (Washington Post)

The bipartisan bill that failed in the Senate last month included nearly $14 billion in supplemental funding for immigration and border security, including $6 billion for ICE detention and deportation operations. The funds would have allowed the agency to boost its detention capacity from 40,000 to 50,000 beds, according to administration officials.

Instead, ICE officials are facing a $700 million budget shortfall, and the agency has started drafting emergency plans to cut costs by releasing thousands of detainees. With fewer available detention beds, ICE has warned that it will also have to cut back on the number of people who cross the border illegally that it can accept from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

That would increase the odds that migrants who enter the United States illegally will be released into the country, rather than detained and deported, regardless of whether they have strong asylum claims.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday that the department has deported or returned more migrants during the past 10 months than during any year since 2013: “They have maximized their operations.”

But deportations have soared because record numbers of migrants are entering the United States. Authorities have tallied about 2 million illegal crossings along the Mexican border on average since Biden took office, the busiest stretch in history.

Edit: this article from the same reporter has still more background:

Biden toughened asylum screening. It won’t contain a new border surge (Washington Post)

For much of the past decade, as soaring numbers of migrants crossed illegally and expressed fear, most were able to pass the initial screening, which sent their cases to U.S. immigration courts. A much smaller number of those who made a fear claim — about 20 percent — were ultimately granted U.S. asylum. Many migrants never complete the application process after they are released from custody to await a court hearing, court data shows.

The gap between the relative ease of passing the initial screening and the tougher odds of getting U.S. asylum is considered by lawmakers from both parties to be an incentive for illegal border crossings. Migrants with weak or fake claims can avoid deportation and live and work in the United States while waiting for their asylum case to plod through clogged U.S. immigration courts — a process that takes five to seven years on average, according to the latest government estimates.

And because DHS doesn’t have enough asylum officers to screen all the migrants expressing fear, border crossers who don’t get initial interviews are referred to the immigration court system and released into the United States. About half of illegal border crossings are families with children, who are generally not detained.

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DHS’s emphasis on asylum cases has diverted so much attention to the border that its other caseloads are growing worse. The backlog of “affirmative asylum” cases — from applicants who seek protection after entering the country legally — nearly doubled last year to more than 1.1 million cases.