Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be using a much wider net to arrest undocumented immigrants, doing away with the Obama administration’s priorities that had shielded millions of people living in the U.S. illegally, lawmakers said Friday.
According to Democrats who met with ICE officials Thursday night, ICE said it will continue to target immigrants with criminal convictions, but agents will now be free to arrest anyone else they encounter who is in the U.S. illegally, doing away with the Obama administration priorities that shielded millions of immigrants without criminal records from deportation.
“They said that we can and should expect many more arrests and removals this year,” said House Democratic Caucus vice chairwoman Linda Sanchez, D-Whittier, who attended the Thursday night meeting between ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan and congressional leadership.
Under the new policy, Sanchez said, “essentially anybody who has an immigration status violation is a priority for deportation.”
“The message is that everybody is at risk,” said Sanchez. ICE’s “only limitation,” she added, “is its own resources.”
Supporters of immigration restrictions have applauded the changes.
“This removes a lot of the restrictions that were put on ICE agents,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump has essentially taken the handcuffs off of immigration enforcement agents, she said.
“ICE is not going to have to wait for someone to commit a terrible crime or ignore someone that they encounter on the street,” Vaughan said. “They can go back to enforcing the law.”
But questions remain about ICE’s new enforcement policies. In the absence of clear priorities, legal experts say it will likely fall to individual agents to determine which immigrants are detained and deported.
“It’s a recipe for chaos,” said Stephen Legomsky, a law professor at Washington University who served as chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Obama. “Without centralized priorities, enforcement can’t reasonably be uniform.”
The confusion over ICE’s policies — combined with high-profile raids in Southern California cities — has sent many Southern California immigrants into a panic.
The Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights Los Angeles said it received more than 2,000 calls from immigrants worried about ICE enforcement. False reports of raids and immigration “checkpoints” spread across social media.
“The panic comes from the vagueness, said Benjamin Wood, an organizer for day laborers at the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center. “The less details there are, the greater potential there is for people to use their imagination to fill those gaps.
Anxiety and confusion gripped Southern California’s immigrant communities this week as new details emerged about the Trump administration’s plans to expand deportations of those living in the United States illegally.
A series of immigration raids that netted 680 arrests — including 161 in the Los Angeles area alone — set off waves of rumors and fear, sending activists scrambling for answers on who the administration was targeting for enforcement.
New reports Friday that a draft plan was written at the Department of Homeland Security that suggested deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up undocumented immigrants only added to the panic.
The White House strongly denied the report, calling it “100 percent not true.”
The idea “conjures images of Japanese internment camps and mass deportations of Mexican immigrants under President Eisenhower,” Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, said in a statement.
“I challenge Republicans and Democrats, whether they are members of Congress or governors, to condemn this plan and ensure it never sees the light of day.”
Still, the fact that such a memo was circulated among Homeland Security officials suggests the aggressive approach the federal government is taking to execute Trump’s immigration plans, including executive actions that make nearly all undocumented immigrants priorities for deportation.
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