Campaign Action
Multiple times this past spring and summer, Donald Trump claimed that he watched Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents “liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13,” saying in May that “the people are dancing and they're waving and they're looking out their windows and they're waving at the ICE people.”
This is a demented fairy tale existing only in his brain, because 14 months’ worth of ICE data reveal that the arrests of immigrants with no criminal record at all have more than tripled under Trump, “and may still be accelerating,” NBC News reports.
In response to California taking action to protect its undocumented immigrant residents, former acting ICE director Thomas Homan promised an increase in “collateral arrests”—a crass term describing when non-targets are swept up in targeted raids because they happened to be there at the time—and it appears Homan’s promise is partially to blame.
“The surge has been caused by a new ICE tactic of arresting—without warrants—people who are driving or walking down the street and using large-scale ‘sweeps’ of likely immigrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in June by immigration rights advocates in Chicago,” NBC News continues.
This is a terrifying police state, courtesy of our tax dollars being spent not on targeting people who actually do pose a threat to public safety, but instead moms and dads trying to get to work. “During the same time period, the numbers show that arrests of undocumented immigrants with criminal records grew just 18 percent.”
"What's really different about this enforcement action,” said Mark Fleming of the Immigrant Justice Center, “is that they are literally doing roving stops, whether by car or on foot, stopping people without any sort of articulable facts. It sends a message to the Hispanic community that we intend to racially profile you in your communities." That was always candidate Trump’s intention. Now as president, he’s carrying it out.