U.S. Rep. Van Orden: Sounds alarm on half of Wisconsin federal prison inmate population being illegal aliens

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, Congressman Derrick Van Orden (WI-03) participated in a House Judiciary Committee field hearing in Milwaukee on the effects of the current southwest border crisis on Wisconsin residents and communities. 

During the hearing, Congressman Van Orden questioned the witness panel on the Federal Correctional Institution Oxford holding 650 illegal aliens who committed felonies in the facility, which is over half of the facility’s housing capacity of 1,200. In a meeting with Oxford’s administrators a week prior to the hearing, Rep. Van Orden was informed that the cost to house a single inmate at Oxford is $42,000 per year, leading the facility to spend over $27 million per year on housing the illegal aliens alone in their custody. Federal law requires that illegal aliens who are convicted of felonies while residing in the U.S. must complete their sentence in the U.S. prison system before being deported.

To watch Rep. Van Orden’s line of questioning during the hearing, click here or below.

(watch)

Rep. Van Orden addressing the Oxford Federal Prison illegal alien population with Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson:

Rep. Van Orden:

“The criminal illegal alien that Congressman Tiffany referred to earlier made his way across the border with Venezuelan gang tattoos. Those are not a, “Live to Ride, Ride to Live” tattoo. That’s either: You’re a member of that gang and you have that tattoo, or they will cut it off you while you’re living, so that should have been taken for what it is at the border. This person never should have been allowed in the country, made his way to Minneapolis, arrested for crimes after the Dane County Sheriff had warrants out for strangulation and some other violent crimes, and didn’t bother following up with it because both those places are Sanctuary Cities. 

“Then he came to a place a half mile away from where four of my grandchildren live and brutally raped a mother and assaulted a daughter over a period of days. This could have been stopped at any point, and solely because the Biden Administration is pushing an incredibly horrible political agenda, this is going to keep happening over and over and over again.

“Senator Johnson, I found this out last week, and I want to know if you’re tracking. We went to the federal prison in Oxford in my district, and half of the prisoners are illegal aliens. Are you tracking the volume of what’s taking place? This is the second and third order effect of opening up these borders, but when half of an institution is occupied by illegal aliens, that’s something that I’m hoping we’re going to be looking at here under a Trump presidency. Are you tracking this, Sir?”

Sen. Johnson:

“I’m not, but it’s not surprising. It’s not just going to be federal prisons; it’s going to be local prisons and they’re going to be bearing the brunt of the cost of this. I think the House Committee said that the cost of dealing with this crisis is about $150 billion per year across all governmental units. That’s a massive cost imposed on us by the Biden-Harris administration, and that gang member never should have been let into this country. The vast majority of people are as sympathetic as I am with people who want to come here for opportunity but don’t qualify for asylum. There is a very tough standard. You have to be persecuted by your government or threatened with persecution. This open border is a setback in establishing a functioning legal immigration that is controlled and brings people in to improve our economy. I’m for a robust legal immigration system, and we need one. We certainly need one here in Wisconsin – certainly in your district with all the farmers. We need workers, we need laborers, and immigrant laborers do a great job. They come here, they work their tail off, but it has to be a legal system. You cannot establish that until you secure the border. So, Biden has set back establishing that legal system…” 

Rep. Van Orden:

“At one point, they had 17 to 20 some thousand rotating through Afghan refugees at Fort McCoy, which I represent. We went back and looked at every single Afghan that came here that was eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa, meaning they worked with the United States government during the war. Guess how many of those were qualified for SIV – zero…

“The last thing we’re looking at is about 250,000 missing children the Biden administration has lost. The Biden administration, under the Harris Border Czar, is solely responsible for losing almost a quarter of a million children in the United States that are most likely being trafficked, knowing full well that they were releasing them into the hands of members of transnational criminal organizations and human sex traffickers.”