President Donald Trump is struggling to deport some immigrants, who have served time in the U.S. for a variety of offenses, The Washington Post is reporting.
Trump had slammed former President Barack Obama for releasing thousands of criminals, who he claimed should have been deported back to their homelands.
"Day One, my first hour in office, those people are gone," Trump said while campaigning last year.
But some countries will simply not take them back after their release from prison, according to the newspaper. Some nations are unable to find the needed records. Others are in no rush to act on cases involving their citizens with criminal records.
"It's very difficult when you have recalcitrant countries that typically will not take those individuals back," said John Sandweg, a lawyer who once served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees deportations.
"I'm not at all surprised to see that the Trump administration is having to release people."
So far, Trump's efforts to deport the immigrants mirror that of Obama's, CNN reported.
In February, the first full month of Trump's presidency, 17,226 people were removed from US soil, 52 percent of whom (9,032 people) were convicted criminals, CNN reported, attributing the figures to ICE.
And during the same period in 2016 under the Obama, 17,606 people were deported, 60 percent of whom (10,509 people) were convicted criminals, according to the news network.
ICE will not say how many criminals have been freed since Trump was sworn in. The agency would also not disclose the list of countries refusing deportees.
Trump had signed an executive order in January instructing Homeland Security and the State Department to deny visas to nations not cooperating with deportations, the Post reported.
But the State Department has been reluctant to act on it.
Denying visas to another country "is a powerful tool that we have, that is usually not something that we would jump to very quickly," said Will Cocks, spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs.
"There are other tools that we have that we can use to try to get countries to issue travel documents and accept their nationals back."
Others note it is too soon to evaluate Trump's efforts on ridding the U.S. of foreign-born citizens who have committed crimes in the U.S.
"From our perspective it's early on in the process," said Chris Crane, president of the pro-Trump ICE union. "It's pretty unrealistic to think that the administration can get all of these things taken care of in the first month or first 100 days. They've got a million priorities, and this is just one."
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