The Department of Homeland Security is deporting 3,600 migrants per day after shifting focus from worksite visits, homeland security chief Markwayne Mullin told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night.
“We’ve changed our priorities from doing, let’s say, job site raids to doing [arrest] warrant raids, meaning that we go into cities and we go after the worst of the worst,” Mullin said. He added:
We’re deporting roughly on average 3,600 individuals a day, but we’ve got 3.5 million individuals waiting for the court cases to be heard, so there’s a backlog between us being able to have the court system catch up with the amount of arrests that we’re having.
The deportation of 3,600 is a large number, but it only adds up to 1.3 million migrants per year in a society with an illegal migrant population of at least 14 million. The backlog numbers are dropping amid Mullin’s deportations.
There is much controversy about Mullin’s de-emphasis on penalizing the employers who pay and shelter many millions of illegal migrants.
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For example, White House border chief Tom Homan has repeatedly called for penalties against the employers who refuse to hire Americans. In October, Homan told White House reporters that he is pushing for more worksite visits.
“I know the worksite enforcement plan just cleared last week out of HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] because I asked for the plan,” Homan told Fox News. He added:
I think the gentlemen I brought in did a tremendous job. A lot of it is focusing on not just worksite enforcement, but those who use fraudulent IDs to steal your Social Security numbers. We’ll prosecute them.
And for employers that knowingly hire illegal aliens, it’s not just about arresting aliens. It’s about holding employers accountable so they don’t try employing illegal aliens.
So I think we’ll move quickly on that. I just saw the draft from HSI last week, so I think the secretary will probably see it this week or next week. And I’m all for it.
Advocates for worksite visits say they would push more migrants homeward without triggering street brawls by pro-migration groups.
Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigraiton Studies, told Breitbart News on November 6, after the Democrats’ blowout win:
Enforcement is imperative both in a policy sense and a political sense. Broadly speaking, the public wants immigration control, but they don’t like to see pictures of it … [T]his is a good opportunity for a reset in two ways.
One, recalibrate the balance between the body-armor [public enforcement] and [private] briefcase enforcement. Do a lot more payroll audits, no-match letters, debanking of illegal aliens, and change the “Know Your Customer” rule for banks. All of this stuff can have an enormous impact [on migrants’ incentives]. It’s way more likely to get people to leave than memes of people in shackles going on a plane.
Also, you can’t take a picture of it! It’s not police chasing anybody else [on the street]. It’s all very anodyne, but also very effective. I’ve made that case before … Even the vice president in his diagnosis on Twitter said he’s open to focusing enforcement more on employers.
But business interests strongly oppose the loss of their experienced illegal workers, partly because they do not want to take on the difficult task of recruiting, paying, and training some of the several million American men who have been pushed out of the workforce over the last decade.
In the Ingraham interview, Mullin repeated President Donald Trump’s focus on “Worst of the Worst arrests, saying: “We’ve re-prioritized what we’re doing by going after the worst of the worst, by getting the murderers and the rapists and child predators and drug bankers and cartel members.”
“We focus on the worst of the worst,” Trump told reporters at a November 9 White House press conference where he suggested many working migrants could get legalized. He said:
We want to get the murderers out. We’ve gotten most of them out. We’ve got most of the really bad [out]. … We’ve gotten most of them. We want to get the worst of the worst, and then we’ll see what happens.
Trump’s focus on deporting criminals is supported by roughly 80 percent of Americans.
But it is also supported by business groups who are eager to keep the public’s focus on actions against violent migrants instead of working migrants. Mullin created a large plumbing business in his home state of Oklahoma, and is sympathetic to company owners’ desire for reliable labor.
Yet a majority of Americans — and a supermajority of Republicans and a large share of Latinos — also want all illegal migrants to be sent home.
The view was spotlighted on Monday when pro-American activists spotlighted an American roofing contractor who boasted on X that his illegal-migrant work crew helped him grow wealthy.
Amid the Ingraham interview, Mullin repeatedly said that Trump’s talk of legalization does not imply amnesty for migrants:
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