ICE is supposed to enforce America’s immigration laws. As in, they’re supposed to be carrying out government policy on who stays and who goes. Instead, they’re doing something entirely different: ferrying illegal immigrants all around the country at the low low price of hundreds of millions of dollars:

Government figures obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute through an open records request show Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent an average of $665 per juvenile in 2014, with most of that going to the cost of airplane flights to shuttle the children among government agencies, to relatives here in the U.S. or back to their home countries — if they’re deported.

At that rate, ICE will spend about $4.5 million flying just the children nabbed at the border in October, and somewhere north of $100 million since the surge began in earnest in 2014.

“It’s insult to injury on a massive scale,” said Dale Wilcox, executive director of IRLI.

He blamed President Obama’s 2012 deportation amnesty for young adult illegal immigrants, the so-called Dreamers, for the surge, saying it enticed tens of thousands of new migrants, particularly juveniles, to take a risk on making the trip.
 

I for one can’t think of another story that better illustrates the overwhelming silliness of the American bureaucratic leviathan. A government agency with a specific mission spending hundreds of millions to pass the buck to other agencies, to burden the states, and to do things that are specifically not what the agency is meant to do. 

The wall can’t go up fast enough.