The ICE director says it would take 140 years to deport just the illegals who entered in the surge of the past two years. He says the agency can't track down and deport that many.
U.S. Border Watch president Curtis Collier says it doesn't surprise him.
"We do this about every decade; we get a major burst and then it'll settle down for a while and you get another burst. But you never get 'em all deported."
Collier says the flooding strategy is working.
"People can flood in this country thousands per day but we can't process thousands a day out through the legal system and through other ways, so it's certainly going to take a long, long time to ever get 'em out of the country."
Collier says almost all of the illegals who've crossed the border in the most recent surge will stay.
"I think we will have a large, large percentage of those people, probably 80 to 90 percent, will stay in this country either from a lack of prosecution or the lack of ability to prosecute them out of the country."
ICE told the Washington Times the border surge over the last two years added 900,000 cases to ICE’s non-detained docket, which now totals more than 3.3 million.