(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Biden administration has doled out more than 300,000 smartphones to illegal immigrants in an attempt to track them.According to the Daily Wire, the exorbitant gift to the non-citizens is part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program called "Alternatives to Detention," which allows migrants into the United States prior to their court dates.
The smartphones, which cost $361,218.08 of American tax dollars per day, make use of facial recognition, GPS monitoring and voice identification to monitor illegal aliens.
John Feere, former senior adviser for the Department of Homeland Security, said that the program was a "costly failure," noting that thousands of illegal immigrants have disappeared despite the attempts to track them.
"And there’s no reason to think this will be any different," Feere said. "The goal should be to quickly determine whether these individuals have a valid case, and if not, to quickly deport them."
Feere said that the DHS is in the process of developing a social services program that will benefit non-governmental organizations without guaranteeing that any of those individuals would return home when ordered.
The ATD program had 91,793 illegal immigrants enrolled in 2020, and 136,026 in 2021. When President Joe Biden took office, the number of enrollments skyrocketed to 316,700 illegal immigrants.
Ron Vitiello, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that this program is the "sort of thing popular among the left."
"It sounds great, but the reality is that people in these programs will likely never be [deported]," Vitiello said. "There’s nothing at the end of these programs. If they don’t report in, that’s that. They’re now a fugitive."
Over two million migrants had crossed the border for the fiscal year in August, a new record for migrant encounters at America’s Southern border.
Of those encounters, an estimated 1.6 million have hearings scheduled who are not in detention, according to an internal ICE report.