White House adviser Stephen Miller could not have been any clearer. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity in May that aggressive arrest quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement would achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million immigrants a year.
“Under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller said, “we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day. And President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day so we can get all of the Biden illegals that were flooded into our country for four years out of our country.”
Miller’s voice rose as he continued:
“We can’t take the risk of letting these Biden illegals roam around freely so the next American daughter can get raped, the next American kid can get murdered, the next American family can get splintered and torn apart by people who came into this country unchecked, uncontrolled, unvetted, uninvited by the American people.”
Now, however, the Trump administration says no such quota exists. Immigration enforcement, the administration says, is based on “individualized assessments.” The idea of a quota, the Department of Justice claims, originated in “media reports.”
The change in tone comes amid escalating legal challenges to the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. In at least one case, an appeals court has rejected the depiction of a kinder, gentler deportation strategy.
Raids ruled unconstitutional
Miller spoke to Hannity around the time he reportedly instructed ICE officials to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” According to The Wall Street Journal, Miller also suggested sweeping up unauthorized immigrants outside Home Depot and 7-Eleven stores, where day laborers often congregate to look for work.
Unsatisfied with progress in complying with Trump’s promise of mass deportations at unprecedented levels, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ousted two top ICE officials. Like Miller, Noem reportedly had called for ICE to make an average of 3,000 arrests each day.
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The Trump administration denies it has set arrest quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But top officials earlier said Trump wanted at least 3,000 arrests of unauthorized immigrants per day.
Immigrant advocates turned the purported quota against the government in a lawsuit challenging a widespread enforcement action in the Los Angeles area that set off large anti-ICE protests.
A federal judge ruled that many of the ICE raids were unconstitutional, saying that officers had targeted people who spoke Spanish or accented English, performed certain types of work or gathered in places like bus stops, car washes and farms. The judge equated these enforcement efforts to racial profiling.
Among those caught up in ICE raids, according to court records, was Jorge Luis Hernandez Viramontes, a dual Mexican-American citizen who manages a car wash in Los Angeles.
When ICE officers raided the car wash, Hernandez Viramontes showed them his California driver’s license to prove his citizenship. They demanded to see his passport, he said later.
When he asked whether the officers had a warrant, he said, they told him, “Shut the f– up.”
Then, despite his protests that he is an American citizen, Hernandez Viramontes was taken into custody and driven to a nearby warehouse before being returned to the car wash. The ICE officers never identified themselves or showed their badges, according to court records.
‘Inaccurate impression’
In a filing with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week, the Department of Justice offered a different depiction of ICE enforcement activities.
Government lawyers asserted that immigrant arrests and detentions are not intended to fulfill a quota.
“Neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” the Justice Department wrote to the court.
ICE conducts enforcement activities “based on individualized assessments, available resources, and evolving operational priorities — not volume metrics,” the DOJ said. The filing added that the “inaccurate impression” of a quota was “another illustration of why the district court grievously erred by issuing a sweeping injunction restraining the operations of multiple law-enforcement agencies.”
‘You can’t just snatch people up’
The appeals court did not accept the Justice Department’s argument.
On Friday, Aug. 1, the court denied a request to block the temporary restraining order imposed by the district court judge. ICE agents in Southern California continue to be barred from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion that they lack authorization to be in the United States.
Immigrant advocates hailed the decision.
“This ruling affirms what we already knew: you can’t just snatch people up for being brown and working hard,” Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, said in a statement. “Not in the fields, not in a Home Depot parking lot, and not on our watch.”
The Trump administration is likely to appeal to the Supreme Court. Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CBS News that “unelected judges are undermining the will of the American people.”
“What makes someone a target of ICE is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “America’s brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, and rapists — truly the worst of the worst from Golden State communities.”
“Law and order,” she added, “will prevail.”
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Author: Alan Judd
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