Politics
NEW: Trump Issues ICE Quotas In Order To Accelerate Mass Deportations
U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents have been instructed to aggressively ramp up deportation efforts in the coming days. Instead of arresting a couple hundred illegal aliens per day, ICE agents will now be instructed to increase those numbers to anywhere between 1,200 and 1,500 arrests every single day, according to a report from the Washington Post citing officials familiar with the plan.
The quotas were detailed Saturday in a briefing with senior ICE officials, who were informed that each of the agency’s field offices should make at least 75 arrests a day. Field office leaders who fail to meet the new ICE quotas will be held accountable, four sources familiar with the situation told the Washington Post.
“It’s going very well. We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out,” Trump said of the deportation operations earlier this week while meeting with Hurricane Helene survivors in North Carolina. “These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen. We’re taking them out first.”
Border czar Tom Homan has long stated that the administration is currently focused on deporting major threats to public safety, such as illegal aliens with serious criminal records. “We gave them the direction to prioritize public safety threats that we’re looking for. We’ve been working on the target list,” Homan told Fox News when reacting to early deportation efforts, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests and deportations in the early days of Trump’s second term.
He did stress, however, that anyone who entered the United States illegally can and will be lawfully be deported. “So is this what we will see every single day, ending in what the president has promised is millions and millions being deported?” Homan was asked by ABC News host Martha Raddatz on Sunday.
“Yes. But you can see the number steadily increased, the number of arrests nationwide as we open up the aperture. Right now it’s concentrating on public safety threats, national security threats. That’s a smaller population. So we’re going to do this on a priority basis as President Trump’s promised, but as that aperture opens, there will be more arrests nationwide,” Homan answered.
“If you’re in a country illegally, you’re on the table, because it’s not okay to violate laws of this country. You’ve got to remember, every time you’re in this country illegally, you violated a crime under Title VIII, United States Code 1325. It’s a crime. So if you’re in a country illegally, you’ve got a problem. And that’s why I’m hoping those who are in the country legally who have not been ordered removed by the federal judge should leave.”
The new ICE quotas is expected to pave the way for more arrests of illegal aliens who do not qualify as top priority public safety threats.
Senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who is playing a leading role in the Trump Administration’s immigration policy, took issue with the wording of the Washington Post report in an X post. The report claimed that ICE officials will soon be committing “human rights abuses” in order to meet the quotas while referring to illegal aliens as “non criminals” and “migrants without a criminal record,” verbiage Miller pointed out the absurdity of in an X post on Sunday evening.
“‘Non criminals’ is a strange word to use for foreign nationals who have broken into America, stolen jobs, stolen identities, illegally refused to appear before an immigration judge, illegally refused to depart when ordered, illegally claimed tax benefits, illegally paid cartels…,” Miller wrote.
ICE announced Sunday on X that it had joined five other federal agencies in “enhanced targeted operations” in Chicago “to enforce U.S. immigration law and preserve public safety and national security by keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities.” The agency has placed particular focus on “sanctuary cities,” which defy federal immigration law by refusing to allow local law enforcement to work with ICE.
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