
"Border czar" Tom Homan and other top officials oversaw immigration enforcement efforts in Chicago on Sunday, as ICE officials announced 956 arrests in one day.
It was the largest number of single-day arrests since Trump took office last Monday and declared a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is a clear sign that his administration is stepping up efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Axios reports.
The average number of daily arrests of noncitizens with criminal convictions or pending charges in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was 310.7
ICE officials have been directed to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from to at least 1,200 to 1,500 daily because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation campaign so far, the Washington Post reports.
The quotas were outlined Saturday in a call with senior ICE officials, who were told that each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable for missing those targets.
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President Trump claims that his administration will quickly deport "millions and millions" of "illegal aliens" with criminal records, but those millions don't exist.
Under 1% of immigrants deported last fiscal year were kicked out of the U.S. for crimes other than immigration violations. In the past 40 years, federal officials have documented about 425,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions on the ICE's "non-detained docket."
About 13,100 of those were convicted of homicides and are imprisoned in the U.S. They'll have deportation hearings after serving their sentences.
To deport millions of "criminals," Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. Being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.
Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds.
An Axios review of data for nearly 180,000 ICE at-large arrests from October 1, 2017, through Sept. 30, 2023, found that the most common charges for undocumented immigrants were driving under the influence (15%) and those involving drugs (15%), assaults (9%) and other traffic offenses (9%)
"There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport," said Nicole Hallett of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago.
Despite Sunday's high Chicago number, it’s not clear that the number of deportations is actually greater than normal so far, reports Vox.
“So far, ICE hasn’t done anything unusual,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at the Ohio State University College of Law and author of several books on immigration enforcement.
Despite claiming that he would preside over record deportations during his first term, deportations under Trump never surpassed those under former President Obama, who was dubbed the “deporter-in-chief.”
Obama deported about 2.9 million people during his first term and 1.9 million in his second, including about 400,000 in a single year. That far outpaced Trump’s 1.5 million deportations and Biden’s 1.49 million.
Biden deported an average of around 700 people a day in fiscal year 2024, and after raids on Thursday, ICE announced it had deported 538 people.
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