On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director under President Obama, said that the Trump administration isn’t focusing on deporting “the worst of the worst”, but rather those who “were previously ordered to deport five, six years ago, but ICE gave them a stay, allowed them to stay in the country for humanitarian circumstances, or just people who didn’t leave the country, but were not detained when they went through the court process.”
Sandweg began by saying that “the Trump administration has really wrangled the immigration enforcement system to move at a pace like we’ve never seen before, expediting — not only increasing the number of arrests, but expediting the processing of those individuals on the back end and then removing them from the country.”
He added that ramping up deportations to a million per year will be difficult to do unless there are more immigration judges.
Sandweg further stated, “As you look at this data today, right? What you’re seeing is it’s really not about the worst of the worst. The problem — the challenge that the secretary faces, and the contradiction in what he says is that, in immigration enforcement, if you’re trying to drive up the total number of deportations, trying to hit a high number like this administration is trying to do, it pushes ICE to focus on — more on those noncriminal populations. There are a couple of reasons for this: The first is that, generally, that population is easier to find. The hardened criminals are more adept at hiding, and they make it harder on the agents to track them down. It requires a lot more work just to make that one apprehension. But the second problem is that, because of those due process issues I mentioned a moment ago and these backlogs in the immigration court, it pushes the ICE agents to focus on populations, not based on whether or not you have a criminal history, but whether or not on — or on how quickly ICE can actually deport you after they arrest you.”
He continued, “And so what you’re seeing — a lot of what we’re seeing ICE do today, through these tactics and through some of their targeted operations, is focusing on populations that are quick — easy to deport, because either, A. Let’s say they were previously ordered to deport five, six years ago, but ICE gave them a stay, allowed them to stay in the country for humanitarian circumstances, or just people who didn’t leave the country, but were not detained when they went through the court process. In either of those cases, typically, those populations tend to be the more sympathetic populations, right? The populations that have lived here longer, that don’t have a criminal history. And so that’s the juxtaposition. As they feel this pressure to ramp up the number of arrests, the only way to do that is not by focusing on the worst of the worst, but on the rest of the population, which is just easier to remove.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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