The Cato Institute asserted that the policy focus on mass deportation of asylum seekers during Donald Trump’s 2017-2020 presidency caused an increase in the number of criminals released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a report released by the right-of-center US think tank on Wednesday.

The report posits that the former president’s immigration policies created a surge in the number of noncitizens convicted of crimes released by ICE, by citing executive orders and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos.

Shortly after becoming president in January of 2017, Trump signed an executive order that sought mass deportations of asylum seekers, changing an Obama-era policy that primarily prioritized deportations of immigrants with a criminal history. While the order on its face purported to prioritize criminal deportations still, the focus on mass deportations of asylum seekers made it fundamentally impossible for ICE to logistically focus on removing criminal noncitizens from the country.

According to the data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the number of criminals encountered by Border Patrol began to rise. It eventually spiked to the highest ever recorded levels after the Title 42 policy banning asylum was put in place. During 2018 and 2019 tens of thousands of criminally convicted noncitizens were released from custody while the administration focused on prosecuting asylum seekers going from 17,069 in 2017 to 19,383 in 2019 totaling out to 58,184 from January 2018-February 2020. Data also showed that the number of evasions or “gotaways” significantly increased under the Title 42 policy.

According to the Justice Department, “anecdotal accounts from the field” claimed that the Border Patrol was “missing actual worthy felony defendants” and was simply returning the migrants to Mexico where they would then try again. This failure to apprehend and prosecute felony individuals was blamed on the inability of Border Patrol to “properly process and identify serious/dangerous criminal aliens” under the new initiatives.

The Trump administration’s immigration policy resulted in thousands of children being separated from their families during deportation proceedings with a failure to reunite many children due to faulty record keeping. Trump ended the policy in June of 2018. On the eve of leaving office, Trump finalized sweeping asylum regulations even while federal courts blocked many of the restrictions going into effect. The border crisis has continued under the Biden administration who were recently sued in court by rights groups over their asylum ban.