Immigration raids led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted scores of U.S. cities this week. Widespread ICE raids were carried out in Chicago on Sunday and New York City on Tuesday, in addition to smaller raids in Phoenix, Atlanta, San Diego, Miami, and other cities across the country. The raid in Chicago, which has continued throughout the week, was highly publicized: even celebrity TV host Dr. Phil rode along with immigration officials to contribute to the “shock and awe” spectacle of the massive round-ups. The scale of the ICE operations has been chilling for residents: in neighborhoods like majority-Mexican Pilsen, school attendance has dropped significantly and families are attending church services through Zoom as a result of a new federal policy that lifted a ban on immigration raids in “sensitive places” like schools, churches, and hospitals.
Cautious activists and analysts have warned that, though the threat is real, so far, Trump’s immigration blitz is mostly a media frenzy to incite fear and drum up support for the administration's anti-immigrant agenda. In terms of overall numbers, the raids do not constitute a massive departure from his first administration. Nor have they always been effective. Local governments have in many cases been successful in refusing to cooperate with federal immigration officials, and local communities have held “know-your-rights” trainings to share information about how to avoid capture. Federal officials have complained directly about how these resistance initiatives have made their jobs much more difficult. ICE’s planned third raid in Aurora, Colorado was called off this week due to media leaks and the ongoing organizing of activists.
Even still, ICE has conducted an unprecedented number of arrests for a new administration. The average number of detentions per day last week hovered around 1,000, a huge spike from the previous average of around 300 daily arrests under Joe Biden. The agency has been championing its arrest numbers on social media in daily “enforcement updates.” It has also been publishing photos of the individuals being apprehended, listing their names, alleged crimes, and countries of origins in order to incite against alleged “violent criminals in their midst. ” fear so that people believe that those who are being arrested are “violent” criminals. “Every one of them is either a murderer, a drug lord, a kingpin of some kind, a head of the mob, or a gang member,” Trump said Monday of deportees.
Even though being undocumented is a civil offense, not a crime, the Trump administration has stated explicitly that it sees all undocumented migrants as “criminals.” In its daily arrest totals, ICE has purposely lumped together those who were arrested for being undocumented and those who were charged with “violent” crimes. The link between deportation and the commission of any crime was made even murkier by the bipartisan passing of the Laken Riley Act, which requires the detention of undocumented immigrants who are merely accused of even low-level crimes like theft.
The Trump administration has also changed the means through which migrants are deported, as well as the places in which they can be temporarily detained. In a move that has sparked tensions with Latin American leaders who are wary of U.S. foreign intervention, the government has started to deport migrants on military planes, as it did in the case of deportees last week to Guatemala. On Wednesday, Trump also signed a memorandum instructing the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to prepare a migrant detention facility suitable for upwards of 30,000 people on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Naval Base, a key part of the United States’s military presence in the region and home to the high-security prison that housed many of those alleged to have committed the 9/11 attacks, is also home to a migrant detention facility that has been dogged by claims of inhumane conditions.
