Despite claiming that the southern border is "secure," the Biden administration has just admitted to releasing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the country without any way of tracking them down.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to having "no records" of illegal immigrants released into the country with electronic ankle monitors, the Daily Caller reported.

Biden loses track of illegals

The startling admission followed an inquiry from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) concerning Alternatives to Detention (ATD).

The program was created during the George W. Bush administration to track illegal immigrants who the government lacks the capacity to detain until their court date. But ICE has now admitted to having "no records" of the 377,980 immigrants enrolled in the program.

“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data," TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

"The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program."

Catch and release

The gap in data goes back to 2019, but many of the immigrants lost were likely released on Biden's watch.

The Washington Examiner reports that the number of illegals on ankle monitoring has ballooned from 86,000 when Biden was inaugurated to more than 343,000.

The trend is in keeping with Biden's aggressive efforts to abolish ICE in everything but name by curtailing the authority of agents to arrest and deport illegal immigrants. Biden has gone to extraordinary measures to handle the influx of illegal immigrants that his own policies are causing, creating a vicious cycle.

Last year, Biden began releasing illegal immigrants into the country without giving them court dates.

Abolish ICE?

Now, it appears that quite a few immigrants released by the administration have been lost. This is "catch and release" at its essence.

The Biden administration has admitted to releasing at least one million immigrants into the country, but the official figures could be much higher. After all, ICE has admitted to having no idea how many people have really been released.

Incredibly, the country has yet to see just how bad Biden's border crisis can get. The Title 42 border policy will remain in place indefinitely following a Supreme Court ruling this week, but if and when it ends, as many as 14,000 immigrants could start storming the border per day.

The only question: is this incompetence or a deliberate effort by Democrats to change the country?