The Obama administration has mislead the American public and lawmakers regarding its catch and release policy toward illegal aliens who have committed crimes. According to a Boston Globe investigation into the 323 criminal illegal immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement released back into New England from 2008 to 2012, about 30% of them went on to commit violent crimes such as rape, child molestation and murder. It’s significant because the number of preventable crimes that ICE is allowing to occur by letting criminals back on the streets is much higher than what the agency told Congress in the past.

Victims include Casey Chadwick, a 25-year-old woman from Norwich, Connecticut, who was stabbed to death by a Haitian in 2015. The man previously did time for another murder. Chester Fairle, the lawyer for Chadwick’s mother, told The Globe, “There’s a serious question of who ICE represents. Who do they work for? Public safety should trump any claim of privilege or confidentiality. It doesn’t come from statute. It doesn’t come from law. It comes from ICE deciding that that’s how it’s going to do things.”

If anything, Obama’s policies toward immigration have become worse. In some cases, Border Patrol is undermining its charge of making a hardened border. It’s detaining non-Mexican illegal immigrants found on the southern border, but rather than deporting them, it’s busing them deeper into the nation and releasing them. Over the last few years, ICE has released tens of thousands of criminal illegals upon this nation’s streets. Now that we know how many of them will probably commit other crimes, we can probably expect a significant percentage of the nation’s crime in the next few years to be caused by Obama’s catch and release policies. But hey, that’s the price for Democrats’ favored agenda of open borders and more voters.