By the time ICE finally got their hands on Christopher Leon Bailey last Monday, he’d already spent nearly two decades running up a criminal rap sheet that reads like a checklist for why immigration enforcement matters. Guns. Robbery. Larceny. Assault with a knife. Running a man over with a car. And through all of it, a Biden-era immigration court decided he was fine to walk around free.
Let that settle for a second.
Bailey is a 27-year-old Jamaican national who overstayed a tourist visa back in 2009. Seventeen years. He wasn’t some recent border crosser who slipped through during the chaos of the last few years. He’s been here illegally for nearly his entire adult life, racking up arrest after arrest while the system found increasingly creative ways to not remove him.
In 2020, New York police arrested him for criminal possession of a loaded firearm. Two years later, in 2022, he was convicted in Kings County on another weapons charge. That’s a conviction, not just an arrest. A court found him guilty of possessing a firearm. He is, by definition, a criminal. A repeat one.
Then in 2023, ICE caught up with him in Philadelphia and arrested him for violating immigration law. Finally, right? Case closed. Man who’s been here illegally for 14 years, with multiple criminal convictions including a firearms offense, gets his ticket punched.
Except it didn’t happen that way.
An immigration judge, appointed under the Biden administration, looked at this record and declared Bailey “not a public danger.” Released him on bond. Let him walk.
The next American who crossed his path paid for that decision.
On January 23rd in Ridley Township, Pennsylvania, Bailey got into a road rage incident after a near collision. According to DHS, he didn’t just yell or honk. He pulled out a knife and tried to stab the other driver. When that didn’t finish it, he got back in his car and ran the man over. Then he fled the scene. Charges came fast: aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, recklessly endangering another person, possessing an instrument of crime.
Local authorities eventually arrested him, and when he showed up at the Delaware County Court last Monday to post bail, ICE was waiting.
“This serial criminal illegal alien’s crime spree in our country is OVER,” said DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis in a statement to Fox News Digital.
She also called it “outrageous” that “this repeat criminal was released by an immigration judge in 2023 and allowed to victimize more innocent Americans, including this individual he intentionally ran over and threatened with a knife.”
She’s right. It is outrageous. And it’s also entirely predictable.
This is what “compassionate” immigration enforcement gets you. A judge looked at a man who had been in the country illegally for over a decade, who had been convicted on weapons charges in two separate incidents, and decided that releasing him was the right call. Not deporting him. Not keeping him detained. Letting him walk. And then we all act surprised when he shows up months later trying to kill someone in a Pennsylvania suburb.
Questions about asylum, about documentation backlogs, about what to do with people who’ve been here for generations. This isn’t that. This is a repeat violent criminal who had no legal right to be in this country and who got to stay here because a judge in 2023 checked a box saying he wasn’t dangerous.
The victim of that January road rage attack, the one Bailey allegedly tried to stab and then ran over, is somewhere out there right now. DHS says they don’t even know if he survived. Think about what that means. The government released a man, that man attacked an American citizen, and federal agencies don’t know whether that citizen is alive.
Under Trump, ICE is actually doing its job again. Bailey is off the streets. But how many more of him are out there, walking around on bond, because some judge decided “not a public danger” was the right call?
We’re going to keep finding out.
