On Our "Virtual Route 66" On #TrumpWatch
Greetings, readers! My apologies for the dearth of posts lately. I’ve been traveling the country to do some reporting for my forthcoming book on criminal defense. Probably not the best timing, given the wholesale attack on our democracy since January 20th.
I’ll be back in Nashville and on a regular schedule in about a week. The good news is, I’ve found quite a few stories and talked to some really interesting folks on this trip. I’ll be writing about some of that in the coming weeks.
— Radley
A Q&A with immigration attorneys on the ground
So far, defense counsel for detained immigrants are seeing only subtle changes in deportations. But it's likely to get a lot worse.
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Three weeks into his new administration, President Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportations is steamrolling ahead, with high-profile raids across several cities, the implementation of arrest quotas for ICE offices, a purging of managerial positions in the immigration courts, and a buffoonishly unconstitutional executive order to end birthright citizenship that thus far has been rebuked and excoriated by at least two Republican-appointed federal judges. Trump also lifted an ICE policy against making arrests at schools, hospitals, and churches.
The raids themselves seem intended to sow fear and generate headlines. ICE agents have been told to optimize the raids for TV cameras, with stunts like inviting DHS chief Kristi Noem, Fox News, and jowly narcissist Dr. Phil to tag along in flak jackets for some authoritarian cosplay. The administration has also announced that it will be stripping protected status from hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn, authoritarian, and disaster-stricken countries, which will leave those people — who came here legally and have committed no violation of any kind — undocumented and eligible for deportation.
Still, on the ground, immigration attorneys and advocates I’ve spoken to say things haven’t yet changed much. The administration hasn’t yet been able to ramp up its deportations beyond a typical day in prior administration. The main change so far is that, contrary to what Trump and Tom Homan vowed during the 2024 campaign, they’re not targeting the most dangerous people. Trump has revoked a Biden-era policy of prioritizing the deportation of undocumented people with violent records. He did the same thing in 2016.
Undocumented people with violent records tend to be in hiding, which means it takes a lot more manpower and resources to find them. If you want quick deportations that generate headlines, you target law-abiding people — undocumented people dutifully showing up for their court hearings, work, or just trying to live their lives. They’re much easier prey.
None of this makes the country safer” of course. But none of this was ever about making the country safer.
Last week, the administration invited Fox News along for ICE raids in Aurora, Colorado to target Tren de Aragua, the alleged Venezuelan gang Trump falsely claimed last year had “taken over” the entire city. The three raids netted one arrest of an alleged gang member. The operation also attracted anger, jeering, and heckling from residents of Aurora, the very people Trump alleges are under “attack” from said gangs.
Immigration “czar” Tom Homan responded to criticism of the bumbling operation — some of which came from local leaders and law enforcement in Aurora — by threatening activists and residents. He also announced that he’d likely be ending the media ride-alongs, not because he’d just been utterly embarrassed, but because, he claimed, “local media” had tipped the gang members off to the coming raids.
There’s no evidence of this. It seems more likely that any alleged gang members might have been tipped off by the fact that Trump has promised for months that the raids were coming.
Meanwhile Trump FCC chairman Brendan Carr sent a stunning threat letter to a local TV station in San Francisco over its coverage of ICE raids in that city. It’s the administration’s clearest, most direct effort to date to censor a media outlet.
State Republican lawmakers are also getting in on the act. There are bills in Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana to put actual bounties on the heads of undocumented people, though none have yet passed. Here in Tennessee, the legislature did pass a flabbergasting bill making it a felony for local officials to vote in favor of laws that would create sanctuary cities. The crime is punishable by up to six years in prison. It’s a clear attempt to criminalize opposition, and a jaw-dropping assault on the First Amendment
A few days ago, I did a phone interview with three immigration attorneys for the public defender’s office in a large city. Keep in mind as you’re reading, though, that only public defenders in large cities tend to have immigration specialists. The courts have decided that because immigration is a civil violation, there is no Sixth Amendment right to an attorney for immigration proceedings unless the person detained has also been charged with a crime. So the vast, vast majority of people swept up by ICE will never have access to attorneys like these.
Given the current political environment, these attorneys have also asked that I not reveal their identities, or the name or location of their office.
I have also edited the interview for length and clarity.
It’s still early days, but are you seeing any significant changes in how raids and deportations are being carried out?
So yes, it’s still early. So far, we have seen some raids but they haven't been different from the ones we've seen from previous administrations. DHS has revoked their policy against conducting arrests at sensitive locations like schools, churches, and hospitals, but it isn’t yet clear if they actually plan to do that sort of enforcement here of if it’s just a way for them to tell people that nowhere is safe. The main change we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of fear in the community right now. But we haven’t yet seen much change on the ground.
We have seen reports of ICE agents approaching schools in some cities and being turned away.
I did hear about those, though I also heard that it may have been Secret Service, as opposed to DHS.
But even the previous policy had provisions in it that enforcement could still be carried out in sensitive locations under certain circumstances. It’s rare that ICE has a policy that completely for forecloses its ability to do any kind of enforcement. There's often some type of caveat. But now there are just no restrictions at all. It’s been left completely up to the discretion of local DHS offices whether to engage in enforcement in facilities that previously would've been considered off limits.
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My understanding is that most of these early deportations have been of clients who are already under removal order. Have you seen any changes in the sort of clients you’re getting — are they mostly people who are easily deportable?
I think the main change we’re expecting to seeis targeting people who've recently been arrested and have been recently released.
I've heard that one change may be that ICE may start issuing detainers before arraignment. Could you explain what that would mean on the ground?
Normally an ICE detainer happens after arraignment. Arraignments usually happen a day or two after an arrest, and that’s when a judge decides whether or not that person should be released before trial. If ICE starts issuing detainers before arraignment, they can detain that person before they’re freed.
I see. So people accused of lesser crimes would normally be let out. If the detainer comes before arraignment, ICE could get them before they’re freed.
Right.
What determines whether ICE issues a detainer on someone? Is it people who have been previously arrested or convicted? Previously deported?
If somebody's arrested who's here without documentation but they haven't been previously arrested or previously subject to removal orders, there would be no reason for them to have a detainer
But sometimes even someone who has never had contact with the criminal justice system may have had contact with immigration agencies, and that's how the immigration agencies would know that the person doesn't have legal status. It might someone who was previously returned away at the border, or it could be someone who applied for a visa at some point and disclosed on the application their foreign birth and lack of immigration status. Those are a couple ways I know of where they could now someone’s undocumented status. But we also aren’t completely aware of all the databases that they have access to and all the ways they obtain information. So there could be other ways that they’re determining immigration status.
The administration initially claimed that they’d be prioritizing people with violent records. But after the public feud between Trump and Colombian President Petro, Colombia and Brazil said that most or even all of the people on deportations flights to those countries had no criminal record, either in the U.S. or in their home countries. I was under the impression that most people accused of being here illegally have due process rights before they can be deported — so unless they’re under a removal order, they have the right to be heard in immigration court. But these deportations appear to be happening very quickly. How do we know the people they’re putting on planes are actually eligible for deportation? How would we know if they aren’t?
Good question. So yes, most people have to be placed in removal proceedings before an immigration judge. They’re given the opportunity to present any potential applications for relief before they can be ordered removed. But there are exceptions. Anyone who is apprehended at the border or at an airport without proper entry documents can be placed in expedited removal. Expedited removal has also now been expanded so that anyone who is apprehended within two years of entry to the United States and doesn’t have proper entry documents can also be removed without going before an immigration judge. This was a policy that the Trump administration instituted last time.
There were definitely concerns that ICE was not going to be faithfully checking whether somebody had been in the US for two years — that they were just going to pretend that people had been in the US for less than two years and remove them without putting them before a judge.
If ICE picks somebody up and swiftly moves them out of the country who has the right to be heard in court, it would be difficult for us to detect that. We’d only hear through word of mouth — people communicating what happened to them through families and their communities. And that definitely happens. I don't think it could happen on a mass scale without advocacy organizations hearing about it through communities and families, but it certainly could be happening on smaller scale.
And we know that the Trump administration is going to find ways to short circuit the immigration court process because the current 3.6 million case backlog is a big obstacle to them to deporting the number of people they want.
Also, I mentioned there are also some other circumstances where somebody can be removed without getting to see a judge. One of these is if the person's already been removed before and comes back. Another is if they enter the U.S. through the Visa waiver program, which allows people from certain countries enter as a tourist for 90 days without a visa, but stay for more than 90 days. Those are both circumstances in which someone could be removed without going before a judge.
Do you see the Trump administration taking any measures to expand the number of people who could be deported without due process?
We’ve heard some rhetoric from the Trump administration about wanting to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. This was the extremely problematic law that allowed for Japanese internment during World War II. If a foreign country is declared to be an enemy country because of a declaration of war or an invasion, people from that country could be picked up and removed without due process. But it must be an invasion or predatory incursion. Individual people voluntarily immigrating would not be sufficient.
So it's not clear how easy it would be for them to do this. The first step would be a declaration of an invasion. And I think there would be real questions about that. There aren't any foreign countries that are invading the U.S. There have been no declarations of war on the U.S. The Republicans are using that rhetoric and language, but I don't think there’s a serious argument that migration rises to the level of threat intended by the statute. But this is definitely one of the ideas that the Trump administration has said they might pursue to try to get around the immigration court backlog and the due process requirement that people be put through removal proceedings before they’re deported.
Didn’t Trump already issue an executive order claiming the country is being invaded?
Right. I think that was sort of a preliminary attempt to get the process going. But I don’t think the law has explicitly been invoked yet.
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I’d like to go back to this policy that people here for less than two years can be deported without due process. That seems like a pretty big loophole. How do you prove when you first arrived? And if ICE agents decide they don’t believe you, who reviews that decision?
Yes, it’s very problematic. It’s always problematic to have an enforcement agent be the only person to screen for wether someone is eligible for due process or relief. Obviously, all of the pressure from the executive right now is to maximize deportations. So enforcement agents on the ground have very little incentive to faithfully follow the law. But here again, if we start hearing about widespread violations, there are organizations already preparing to litigate this. Most of them litigated on this issue last time.
We’ve seen reports that the administration has issued quotas to ICE offices — that each of the 25 field offices must arrest at least 75 people per day. Are you seeing evidence of that?
I haven’t specific evidence of that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Once the results of the 2024 election were clear, what preparations did your office take to prepare for what was coming?
We started training staff internally on the policies the Trump administration implemented last time, the ones that they've proposed to implement this time, and how that might look on the ground.
One of the things that's really difficult right now is to separate the bluster from the reality. The effort to strip away birthright citizenship, for example. That’s obviously alarming. But it’s going to be immediately challenged, and it isn’t going to have much impact on what we’re doing right now.
But with other things they’re saying, it’s less clear how it might impact our clients. They say they plan to deport 20 million people, but there’s only around 11 million undocumented people in the United States. What they’re proposing would require exponentially more daily deportations than have ever been done. It isn’t logistically possible. They’re just trying to project the most anti-immigrant position possible. But that also means they’re going to try new things to get closer to their number. They’ll try new policies and new legal arguments, but also see what they can get away with. So we have to anticipate what they might try.
All of that is then complicated by what the courts will allow — so what they say violates current policy, what violates current statute, and what violates the Constitution. We also now have a Supreme Court significantly more conservative than it was during the last Trump administration. So there's a real question of how many of these policies long accepted as clear violations of the law and the Constitution will be enjoined by the courts, and how many will be allowed to go through. That makes it really difficult to plan, and to figure out what the reality is going to look like going forward.
“During the last Trump administration . . . the DOJ put a display on immigration judges’ computer screens indicating whether they were meeting their quota of cases. If hearings were going too long, the display started dipping into the red.”
One thing that struck me about the roadmap Stephen Miller laid out in interviews last year: He talks about transport and military planes, he talks about setting up tent camps, pressuring countries to accept deportation flights, and scaling up deportation capacity. But he never talks about the need to hire more immigration judges, which of course they’d have to do by orders of magnitude to get anywhere near the number of deportations they want. That doesn’t sound like someone who plans to follow the law on due process.
Trump then fired four high-ranking immigration court officials on his first day in office. Are you worried that the judges who remain will feel pressure to rule in favor of the administration?
Absolutely. We call them immigration judges, but they’re really employees of the Department of Justice. They're not Article III judges. They don't have the independence and protections of judges. If the DOJ doesn't think they’re deporting enough people, they can be fired. So yeah. That is certainly a concern.
One of the things that happened during the last Trump administration is that the DOJ put this display on immigration judges’ computer screens that was basically was like a real time indicator of whether they were meeting their quota of cases. So if your hearings were going too long, the display started dipping into the red.
That’s incredible.
Yeah. There was very much a crackdown on the independence of immigration judges.
There were a number of decisions issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that ripped from immigration judges the discretion and authority to do anything other than issue a removal order. They stripped authority to grant continuances or to close cases under certain circumstances, or to put cases on a backlog if someone had a valid claim. They also busted up the Immigration Judges Union, which I understand has still not been revived.
If one of your clients loses in immigration court, how difficult is it to get into federal court to be heard by an Article III judge?
So there is a process for most types of denials to be appealed to federal court. After a removal order you can first appeal within the agency to the Board of Immigration Appeals. After that, the case skips over the federal district courts and goes straight to the circuit courts. So in theory our clients do have the right to appeal a federal appeals court, where you have actual Article III judges who can actually the rules of evidence. By the way, the rules of evidence don’t apply in immigration court — the government can rely on hearsay and other unsubstantiated evidence.
The problem is that the federal courts have been stripped of a lot of jurisdiction to overturn immigration court decisions. So, for example, if there is a legal or a constitutional violation, you can appeal that to the federal circuit. But if an immigration court just in its discretion determines that somebody doesn't merit a benefit, the federal courts cant review over that discretion. So it’s very difficult to get a federal court to review most cases.
So it has to be a constitutional issue?
Or a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, some of the other statutes that control the ways that these agencies operate.
I'll just add that the ability to appeal cases to federal court is going to be a very important tool in the years ahead. Immigration officials are going to be facing a lot of pressure to maximize deportations at all cost. So I think we’re going to see a lot of new tactics, and it’s going to be crucial to be able to bring habeas challenges when one of our clients is detained unlawfully.
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One trope I’ve seen quite a bit on TV legal procedurals is this nightmare scenario in which someone is arrested on immigration charges and then just disappears into the system. They get sent to some detainment facility halfway across the country and their family has no idea where they are. Is that something that happens often in the real world?
ICE has a lot of discretion to choose where people are detained. And as attorneys for the those detained, we have almost no power have someone moved from one detention center to another. For the most part, people are detained in facilities near where they were arrested. But not always. Sometimes a facility will stop accepting new detainees, so they have to go elsewhere. Sometimes that can be in another state, or a few states away, or on the other side of the country. So now they’re now in another state, which may be subject to the laws of a different federal circuit. During the first Trump administration there were a number detained on the East Coast who were shipped off to California, far from their attorneys and far from their families.
There was some speculation that this was to keep them from having access to their attorneys, which wouldn’t be lawful. That’s a difficult thing to prove, but it’s also the the practical of moving people around like that.
If they move someone to another facility or another state, is the government required to notify the person’s family or counsel?
Nope. We then have to scramble to try to find where they are. There are times when we’ve just suddenly learned that a client is no longer at the detention center where we were interacting with them, and we have to figure where they were sent.
Congress just passed the Laken Riley Act, which requires undocumented people to be detained prior to trial for low-level crimes like theft. Can you talk about what effect that will have on the ground?
Mandatory detention means that if you're arrested by ICE and placed in removal proceedings, you don't have the right to apply for bond. You’ve been detained, and it's mandatory for you to be detained for the duration of your removal proceedings. The Supreme Court has said mandatory detention after a criminal conviction is permitted. This law takes things one step further, and requires mandatory detention based only on a charge or an allegation. You don’t need a conviction. And it includes really minor offenses like shoplifting.
If you look at Supreme Court precedent on civil detention, liberty is supposed to be the norm in the United States. Detention is supposed to be the carefully limited exception. It’s supposed to be used only for people who are a flight risk or are a danger to the community.
Immigration detention is civil detention. It is not punishment for a crime. This laws says to people in immigration court, because of the way you entered this country, you no longer have the presumption of liberty. I think it will be challenged on constitutional grounds, and I really hope the challenge succeeds. The idea that merely having someone accuse you of shoplifting makes you such a danger to the community that you forfeit that presumption of liberty, it's just so far removed from reality.
If I’m not mistaken, the only reason they included theft in the law is because the guy who killed Laken Riley had been convicted of theft. But there’s no reason to think that the mere accusation of shoplifting or theft makes you more likely to, say, commit murder.
Right. But since it's, since it's mandatory, it strips, um, discretion from judges to be able to make a determination on a case by case basis. It's mandatory, and it’s extremely disproportionate.
And that detention then makes it easier to deport those people?
Correct. If you can't be released, and you’re already undocumented, then they don't need a conviction for an actual crime to deport you. They just need to show that you aren’t documented. Moreover, removal proceedings are fast-tracked for people who are detained. And because you’re detained, it’s much more difficult for you to communicate with counsel to present your case, to arrange witnesses and, and gather evidence. So basically makes it impossible for people to defend themselves.
Those people would presumable have counsel on the theft charge, but these low-level offenses are often handled in municipal courts, where the right to an attorney is spotty at best, and quite a few studies have shown the representation people do get tends to be pretty shoddy. I suspect those people aren’t always going to get the best advice with respect to their immigration status. I’ve seen reports where people wait in jail for a period longer than their sentence would have been, so they just plead guilty, not realizing that the guilty plea makes them deportable.
In the case Padilla v. Kentucky in 2010, the Supreme Court made it an obligation for criminal attorneys to advise their clients about the deportation risks associated with their cases. In practice, there are a lot of places in the country where attorneys just aren’t trained on Padilla. So yes, a lot of people plead guilty to these low level offenses not knowing that it means they can be deported.
And it isn’t just undocumented people. There are cases where green card holders who've been here for 30 years unknowingly take a plea for a crime that means their status can be stripped and they can be deported.
The administration has made explicit threats against state and local officials who try to block or even refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement, from withholding federal funding to criminal prosecution. Has that changed your relationship with city and state government?
I don't want to comment on that. I'm sorry. I know you have agreed not to identify our office, but I just can’t risk jeopardize anything. So I just don’t want to comment on that.
I understand. The Trump administration has terminated agreements with “Know Your Rights” groups who work with people facing deportation. Will that have a significant impact?
You can imagine that in immigration court you’re going to have people who aren’t aware of the legal system of the United States, and who don’t speak or understand English language. Since there’s no right to an indigent defense attorney for immigration proceedings, and most don’t have thousands of dollars for a private attorney, most of them will have to navigate that system on their own.
The legal orientation programs happen at the courthouses. They provide bare minimum to help orient those people. They aren’t helping people get off on some legal technicality. They help answer questions like, what is happening to me? What is this system? What is this process? To cut even that just makes it impossible for people to defend themselves, to represent themselves.
There is an exponentially higher rate of people winning their cases when they have an attorney, because most people just don't know the forms of relief available to them. They don't know how to gather evidence or make the case for some of these extremely complicated forms of relief. But that also means that those people who win were being wrongly held or detained.
So yes, I think eliminating even these bare minimum legal orientation programs will have a significant impact on those people.
In most of the counry, there isn’t an office yours to provide representation for immigration proceedings. And as you say, there is no Sixth Amendment right to an attorney for immigration violations.
Yeah, I think only a small percentage of people nationwide will get a state-appointed attorney. In many parts of the country, especially border regions, there just aren’t enough attorneys to take those cases even if you could afford one. In some places where there is an office like ours, the DOJ will give them a card with our number and the numbers of other providers, but I’m not sure if they’ll even be doing that anymore after this rollback.
Is there anything else you want people to know right now?
I think it’s important to emphasize one effect this new administration has had that has been much more profound than I expected. It has created this culture of fear that pervades everything — not just among our clients, but in the community and in our office itself. I mean, even you asking me to do this interview, I had to ask myself — what are the risks involved with us even talking about our work? And that’s why I had to ask that you not reveal our location.
We put on trainings, for example. We get asked to do community trainings with advocacy groups to help people know their rights and understand what’s going on. Some of those groups are now afraid to do training events because they’re afraid it will put them and the community at risk.
Five years ago, we were really worried about ICE showing up at courthouses to detain our clients. Now, they’re trying all these different techniques. We’ve heard from other immigration attorneys about ICE agents in bus stations and subways. People aren’t showing up for work. Families are afraid to send their kids to school. College students are afraid to go to class.
So you’re saying that you're afraid to do training sessions because ICE may show up at one of those sessions to check for undocumented people?
Yeah. But also the groups we do those trainings with are now worried about doing them at all. They’ve asked us, if we hosting a public immigration training, is that going to raise a red flag? Or are we putting the people who attend these trainings at risk? Are we putting our own organization at risk?
These trainings are really important. They’re important to make sure people know their rights, but also to help alleviate fears that may not be warranted. But there’s now fear about doing them in the first place.
Do you think those fears are legitimate? Would ICE target a training session?
I’d just say that it’s a very difficult line for us to walk. We have to be conscientious of all the policies they’re implementing, proposing, and floating, and we have to be conscientious of all the possible ramifications of those policies. We’re going see a lot of things that are worse than they were in the past, worse even during the last Trump administration.
But at the same time we want to avoid being alarmist. Because the whole goal here is to spread fear. Tom Homan has been very explicit about this. He wants people to feel fear. He wants immigrants — undocumented or documented — to feel fear and to self-deport. Because every time someone leaves voluntarily it saves them the money they’d have to spend to remove them.
During the first Trump administration people were afraid that ICE would just start sweeping neighborhoods and pulling people out of houses. As a result, a lot of immigrant neighborhoods became ghost towns. People just stopped leaving the house. But that level of enforcement didn't materialize because there just aren't enough resources to do it all over the country. And when people started to see that the worst of their fears weren't being realized, they started reengaging in daily activities.
The Trump administration learned from that, I think. So now they’re announcing raids ahead of time. Or if they do unannounced raids, they’ll publicize them after. They know they can’t sustain continuous raids on a daily basis. So they do them periodically, and make it known that they’re targeting certain types of people. They know they can't maintain the raids on a continuous basis, they’re trying to maintain the fear. So we have try to walk this line between telling people what the real risks are, but also not spreading so much fear that people don't feel like they can live their daily lives.
So getting back to your question, I do think the fear is legitimate. But also, people need to be able to protect themselves. We’re really in unprecedented territory in terms of how this administration is going to wield certain kinds of tools in their toolbox. They’re creating new tools.
In the past we could at least rely on specific parts of the law. We could be confident that we could rely on the precedents set by the courts. We have less confidence in those things right now. We don’t know what workarounds are going to be tried, or what new ways they’ll try to attack immigration.
And then we’re seeing immigration opponents move into other areas, like attacking advocacy itself. So now we have to navigate these entirely new threats, threats where there’s a lot of unknown. So now in addition to our clients’ fears, and the community fear, we have to deal with institutional fear, this fear of survival, fear for your livelihood. It’s multilayered fear, now.
Anti-immigration governors like Gregg Abbott in Texas has been weaponizing state nonprofit laws to go after immigration advocacy groups, too. Is that what you mean?
Yes. That kind of thing. But also the various actions from the Trump administration these past two weeks. Like freezing USAID. Those things may not directly affect immigration, but it’s telling us that this administration is willing to try novel, unique lengths to accomplish what it wants to accomplish. And we know immigration is a huge priority area for them. So there’s just lots more stuff on the table for us to deal with now beyond just representing our clients.
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In recent days, President Donald Trump’s administration has proudly trumpeted early attempts to deliver on a campaign promise of aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has touted the arrest of thousands of immigrants on social media, including some people accused or convicted of serious crimes like rape, murder, and terrorism offenses, alongside suspected members of violent criminal gangs. But the crackdown is also blurring the lines between reality, rumor and performance — reshaping daily life in immigrant communities, even when enforcement never arrives. To some observers, that appears to be a “feature, not a bug,” as an old Silicon Valley saying goes. CNN reported this week that the administration urged agents to be “camera-ready” while conducting raids, and invited media along to maximize coverage. Some officials and agencies have shared their own social media posts from enforcement efforts. Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the nonprofit immigration advocacy group American Immigration Council, told The Boston Globe that the publicity around ICE raids is meant to scare immigrant communities, alongside impressing those who want Trump to make good on his campaign promises. “The sense of — it could be you next — can be a really powerful chilling effect,” Lind told the paper. Some speculate that Trump’s decision to send ICE detainees to the infamous prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, in Cuba, is rooted in this kind of performance. “Is he using this facility because it has the stain of the name Guantánamo? And, of course, the answer is yes,” legal commentator Ben Wittes told Oregon Public Broadcasting. He added that it would be cheaper and easier to hold migrants somewhere in the continental U.S. Immigration arrests have undoubtedly spiked under the new administration, but the scale of the increase is difficult to measure. While ICE has released some initial numbers, immigration data experts have expressed skepticism, noting that the agency is releasing the information much faster than usual, without clear explanations on how the data has been processed, the locations of arrests, or even whether those arrested are being detained, deported or released. Taking the available numbers at face value though, ICE announced an average of 828 arrests per day in the first 10 days of the new administration, according to a Boston Globe report. That’s higher than the 597 daily arrest average for January 2023 and more than twice the 282 daily arrest average of January 2024 under then-President Joe Biden. A New York Times analysis found that over the last eight years, which includes the first Trump administration and most of Biden’s presidency, immigration arrests averaged around 300 a day, a far cry from the new administration’s stated minimum daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests. The low and high annual marks of the last eight years both came under Biden, in 2021 and 2023, respectively. One of the ways ICE appears poised to increase numbers is by conducting more “collateral arrests” than in the past. These occur when ICE agents arrest people who are not their primary target but who are found at the same location without documentation of legal permanent status. In many cases, this means conducting raids aimed at arresting those with criminal records and also detaining others nearby — like family — who do not have any previous arrests. NBC News found that on a 1,200-arrest day in late January, nearly half of those arrested had no criminal record. The real increase in enforcement has triggered a wave of rumors, misinformation and fearmongering on social media, much of it specifically directed at immigrant communities. In San Francisco, a report that a middle school student had been confronted by an immigration agent on a city bus turned out to be false. The same goes for rumors of an ICE raid on a North Carolina grocery store. Store management described the incident as a “malicious hoax,” and there have been others: On Thursday, The New York Times reported that at least three people across the country have been arrested for impersonating ICE agents. The owners of a popular Salvadorian restaurant in New Jersey, meanwhile, are reeling after a viral and false TikTok post about a raid there has virtually wiped out their business. Owner Elio Barrera said his core customers — Latinos from mixed-status families — have been “understandably fearful” about the threat of raids. He lamented to NJ.com that “on social media, there’s a lot of bad actors capitalizing on that fear for views and likes.” The mix of real increased enforcement, higher visibility raids and swirling rumors have combined to disrupt the daily activities of immigrants across the country who are trying to limit their exposure. From Washington, D.C., to Sacramento, California, there are reports of immigrants avoiding public spaces, including work, school, and social services like food pantry access. That’s partly because immigration enforcement officials generally need a judicial warrant signed by a judge to enter a private residence, whereas, in public spaces, officials can make an arrest with an administrative warrant, which ICE officials can sign themselves. In Chicago, The Guardian reports that some immigrants are avoiding public spaces, while others are more defiant. “We are afraid, but fear hasn’t paralyzed us,” Yess Gómez told the news outlet. “My kids don’t deserve to see their mother hiding. And I’m not going to do it.” Gómez is from Mexico and said she has lived in Chicago for two decades. She has a work permit, but not permanent legal status. She described her efforts at contingency planning: a safety check-in system with her husband and children in case one of them gets picked up. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has expressed frustration with how well Chicago immigrants have been educated on “how to hide from ICE,” something Gómez takes pride in. The administration has found Chicago so difficult for enforcement that late Thursday the Department of Justice sued the city, along with Cook County and the state of Illinois, for “affirmatively thwarting” federal enforcement efforts. Local and state officials rejected the accusation, and multiple legal scholars told WBEZ Chicago they are skeptical of the suit’s chances. |
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