This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 28th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

To hear political appointees tell it, sequestration means the sky is falling,

that merely reducing the rate of increase of federal spending

constitutes a devastating blow to Americans' well-being.

Despite strong evidence to the contrary, on the subject of immigration enforcement, it's much the same story.

Alex Narasta, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

A few immigrant detention centers in recent days have released several hundred

unauthorized immigrants who were in detention not for any kind of crime

but have released them because of the upcoming sequestration they anticipate some budget cuts and

they won't be able to hold them anymore so they're letting them go their

deportation cases are proceeding but they're no longer in custody.

Janet Napolitano said that she might have to cut border patrol agents.

And of course, a lot of departments are talking about the cuts

that they'll have to endure. what would that mean she is talking

about cutting 5,000 Border Patrol agents that if all of those cuts occurred on a

southwestern border with Mexico that would bring the Border Patrol force down to a level that we haven't

seen since 2007.

So it's not really that dramatic of a cut.

From that perspective, this brings us back down to the last few years of the Bush

administration. What it would also do is probably diminish capacity to hold people in detention.

Currently they can hold 34,000 people in immigration detention at any given time.

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