Shaqiuel Sheldon Williams came to the United States from Jamaica legally in December 2023. His visa ran out the next month, and he stayed anyway.
He was later arrested in Florida and charged with two counts of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, accused of stabbing people at a Burger King.
His case is one of several in a new report from the Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General. The report shows how many criminal aliens like him the Biden administration knew about and how few it ever went after.
From fiscal 2021 through 2024, Immigration and Customs Enforcement received 3,145,375 leads on foreigners who had overstayed their visas or broken the terms of their entry. It flagged 104,049 of them as possible national security or public safety threats.
ICE made eight arrests off those leads, in four years.
The top of the list looks even worse. Homeland Security Investigations had 1,769 workable leads in Priority 1, its highest-risk category, reserved for the most dangerous people on the list. It opened 84 investigations on them and arrested two.
"As a result," the Inspector General wrote, "foreign nationals who potentially posed threats to the United States remained at large despite their illegal status."
The report traces the problem to a memo. In September 2021, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued new enforcement guidelines. Being in the country illegally would no longer be enough reason to go after someone. ICE was told to focus its overstay work on Priority 1 cases.
That left 3,041,326 leads, almost 97% of the total, filed as "Non-Priority." Nobody was assigned to them.
Then ICE barely touched the priority list it kept. The 104,049 flagged threats produced 21,885 leads ICE considered workable. Those led to 496 investigations, and those led to eight arrests.
The Biden team's defense will be that ICE was stretched thin, and the Inspector General does note that ICE "did not have sufficient resources to pursue all overstay leads." That's an interesting excuse from an administration that pulled agents off enforcement to process the surge at the southern border, which it had invited. Also why wasn't hiring more agents ever considered? The Trump administration has hired more than 12,000 new ICE officers and agents over the last two years.
The report also found that when ICE did try to act on a lead, it often couldn't find the person. By the end of fiscal 2024, ICE had no address for 194 of its 205 Priority 1 targets.
The government let these people into the country legally, and it collected their names, their visa type and their departure date. Then it didn't keep track of where they were inside our borders.
The cost shows up in the cases. A Honduran man who came in on a tourist visa in 2022 stayed after it expired in January 2023, and was later charged in Maryland with rape and sexual assault. A British man who came in under the Visa Waiver Program in 2021 never left, and he was arrested in Nevada on four felony counts of torturing and maiming dogs at an animal shelter. One Jamaican national convicted of firearms offenses is still a fugitive because ICE never found him.
Overstays never got the attention the border did. A visa running out doesn't make the evening news. Someone flies in, the paperwork expires, and they quietly stay. Under the Biden administration, that quiet route stayed open for more than three million people.
"The degree of the Biden administration's dereliction of duty, which needlessly put American lives at risk, is staggering and enraging," said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
The Trump administration scrapped the Biden enforcement priorities on its first day. Expanded visa screening took effect October 1. ICE has agreed with the Inspector General's findings and committed to a full overstay enforcement plan.
Under Biden's DHS, the government flagged 104,049 people as possible threats and arrested eight of them.
