Leading up to the presidential election in 2020, President Trump made repeated promises that his immigration enforcement would go after “the worst of the worst.”
Yet, news stories have shown time and time again that this is not who is being detained. Let’s take for example, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, the nun who was arrested walking to mass in Texas, or Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a blind refugee who was detained and sadly passed away after being abandoned at a doughnut shop by ICE in Buffalo. This was a tragic incident and shows just how irresponsible ICE can be, because Nurul Amin Shah Alam could still be with us if ICE showed him some human decency or compassion and returned him to the care of his family or friends. And, there are many more.
In a report for IRI by Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox, research showed that every time the number of ICE arrests increases, there is a decline in the percentage of those arrested who have been convicted of a crime—even taking into account ICE’s definition of “convicted” that includes people whose cases have been dismissed or are pending. This means, that immigrants without any criminal records are being detained despite the constant claims from the federal administration to target those with them.
ICE is detaining our neighbors who have been de-documented and stripped of their Temporary Protected Status, home health aides who take care of our family members, and teachers who take care of our children. Once Stephen Miller put in place a goal of 3,000 ICE arrests per day it set the stage for what we see today: a large majority of the people arrested have never had a criminal record. Three thousand people per day is not “the worst of the worst,” it’s 1 million people per year.
The reality does not match the rhetoric.
To learn more about who ICE is arresting, check out these resources:
New ICE Arrest Statistics Shed Light on Who the Agency is Targeting in American Communities, American Immigration Council
Latino ICE Detentions Dramatically Reshaped Under Trump, UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge
One Year of Immigration Enforcement Under the Second Trump Administration, Deportation Data Project, UC Berkley
And, the invaluable substack of Austin Kocher.