This is over the top; the timing beyond the pale. I agree with Sen. Chambliss: Feds free illegal immigrants in Georgia, other states - Blame sequestration

From the AJC:

Several hundred illegal immigrants have been released from detention centers in Georgia and other states, federal officials confirmed Tuesday. They said the releases were made to cut costs in advance of automatic spending cuts that are scheduled to take effect Friday.

Critics immediately accused the White House of gamesmanship in the contentious debate over the across-the-board spending cuts, called sequestration. President Barack Obama and Congress have long been at odds over how to handle deficit reduction.

Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss [said]: “This decision by the Obama administration is just another example of the White House’s skewed priorities for political gain in the ongoing spending-cuts debate,” he said.
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And from The New York Times today:

While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, immigration advocates said that the surge of recent releases — so many in such a short span of time — was extraordinary.

 

 Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is also holding immigration hearings, said the releases “lessened the chances” that legislators might reach a bipartisan accord on comprehensive immigration reform.

“It is clear the administration is using the sequester as a convenient excuse to bow to political pressure from the amnesty groups,” he said. “With this new action, the administration has further demonstrated that it has no commitment to enforcing the law and cannot be trusted to deliver on any future promises of enforcement.”

Other Republicans, however, shrugged off the releases, saying they expected that the administration would use the excuse of sequestration to take attention-grabbing action and that they were prepared for more in the coming days.