The Trump administration’s 2017 move throwing out Obama-era immigration enforcement priorities continues to have devastating consequences. USA Today reports that federal immigration officials have arrested a record number of immigrants who have no criminal record at all.
According to the data, a staggering 36.5 percent of immigrants who were swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the end of last year had no criminal record, and were arrested simply for being here without papers. By comparison, USA Today reports, 18 percent of immigrants arrested in Obama’s final month in office had no criminal record.
Obama-era guidelines dictated that priorities were to be “focused on national security threats” and “immigrants convicted of serious crimes,” but immigrant rights advocates know that rogue office directors and agents oftentimes ignored this. Mass-deportation agents have now found a friend in Donald Trump, a friend who has made up ridiculous stories about American towns supposedly being “liberated” from scary brown people.
In reality, ICE has detained babies as young as 5 months old, asylum-seekers who had their children stolen from them at the southern border, a 72-year-old grandfather with Alzheimer’s, and U.S.-born citizens, including a military veteran who was detained for three days. ICE is an out-of-control agency, and the last thing it needed was ongoing funding to carry out abuses, but that’s what just happened under the recent funding deal.
Simply put, our tax dollars are hurting immigrant families. “We’re wasting resources deporting a lot of people who are assets to their communities who have families and mortgages and careers and car notes, and we’re going after them with the same vigor that we’re going after kidnappers and murderers and bank robbers,” said Douglas Rivlin of America’s Voice. “That’s not a smart approach to law enforcement.”