“\u201cAll of this is unprecedented,\u201d John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director, tells POLITICO Magazine. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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he noted the Trump administration has revved up the agency\u2019s raid strategy, leading to broad and indiscriminate sweeps to maximize arrests \u2014 regardless of people\u2019s criminal record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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What we have seen is that immigration enforcement has become probably the central priority for all U.S. law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense. This executive order has elevated this to the highest priority. I\u2019ve never seen a whole government effort focused like this, even in the State Department. As a result of that, we\u2019ve never seen an immigration enforcement effort like this. And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways, really quickly.\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you\u2019re at ICE, of course you can run down to a Home Depot parking lot. Any administration could have done this: round the Home Depot parking lot, stop a bunch of day laborers and ID them. In car washes, in places where low-wage workers work, places like that. The reason that historically hasn\u2019t been done, is you just don\u2019t find criminals there. Once in a blue moon you find someone, and we see that the administration highlights when they get someone who has some criminal history. But by and large, your really serious criminal threats don\u2019t do shifts at the local car wash for minimum wage. They\u2019re out making their money, making a living as a criminal.\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so ICE has always focused our operations on getting those individuals \u2014 that takes more time, though. You\u2019re taking lists of people who are criminally convicted and you\u2019re identifying them, and then once you identify them, you\u2019re doing research on addresses, and then you\u2019re building a dossier and sending a team out to get them. The Obama administration deported a large number of people, but generally, a very high percentage of them were people who either just crossed the border or people with a serious criminal history.\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This administration, though, is taking a different tack. This administration has repurposed the way they\u2019ve operationalized ICE \u2014 to go out and get as many people as possible, and that\u2019s why we\u2019re seeing these raids on the car washes and on the Home Depot parking lots. They know they can make a large number of arrests there, and they don\u2019t seem to care whether or not those people pose a threat to public safety. They just say, \u201cIf you\u2019re undocumented, you\u2019re a fair target.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This administration is going to want to get as many of these new agents out in the field as quickly as possible. Normally, to hire this many people, it would take the agency three, four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that the agency only has the capacity to do so many background checks at once, to interview so many people at once. The training academy can only train so many people at once. It would take years to fully deploy these agents. This administration clearly doesn\u2019t want to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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I spent five years at DHS working on ICE issues. It just wasn\u2019t an issue. None of the officers felt the need to wear masks. I think it\u2019s an unfortunate byproduct of the administration\u2019s policies. This is a very contentious area of law, this idea that we\u2019re not going to discern the difference between migrants who might be committing serious crimes and those who might have real long-term presence in the United States, young children and family members and things of that nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hate that the agents are wearing the masks. I think it is hurting the reputation of the agency, and feeding a lot of these narratives about the agency. But I\u2019m also sympathetic to the agents themselves, who need to protect themselves and their families. Like we just talked about, there are these upticks, these massive upticks in assaults on the agents. These threats against the agents are real, and there\u2019s, unfortunately, a lot of people out there who can\u2019t discern the difference between the administration and the policymakers and the agents themselves. And as a result of that, these agents feel compelled to take steps to protect themselves and their family, and I\u2019m sympathetic to it.\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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What\u2019s different is who they\u2019re targeting. Under Obama, under Biden and even to a certain extent, under the first Trump administration, there were priorities. The agents were told, \u201cFocus first on the worst. Worst first. Get the worst bad guys off the street first, we\u2019ll deal with everything else later.\u201d Those rules are gone.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n