Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort has been lagging behind his goal. His vice president, JD Vance, at one point forecast a million deportations a year this term; the administration hasn’t only been well behind that lofty number—they’ve struggled to keep pace with removals last year, when Joe Biden was still president, and have called on migrants to “self-deport” to help boost their stats.
That’s been a point of frustration for Stephen Miller, the administration’s resident anti-immigration zealot. Unsatisfied with the pace of deportations thus far, he has demanded recently that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement make no fewer than 3,000 arrests a day—and threatened to fire officials who hold them back from meeting that quota. They haven’t quite hit that, but ICE this week recorded its most detentions in a single day, according to NBC News, arresting more than 2,200 people Tuesday—the result, it seems, of more aggressive tactics by authorities.
Indeed, in recent days, there have been reports across the country of migrants enrolled in alternative to detention programs being arrested after appearing at ICE offices for check-ins. In one instance, on Wednesday, at least 10 were arrested in downtown Chicago, apparently after receiving text messages instructing them to check in with ICE; in a chaotic scene, masked agents loaded detainees into vans as community members, and elected officials, protested.
“They’re kidnapping people,” Chicago alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez told WGN News.
The Trump administration has insisted, throughout its shock and awe immigration program this year, that it is targeting criminals—the “worst of the worst,” as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem puts it. But it is obviously going much farther than that, as the arrests at ICE check-ins underscore: These were people apparently following the directions—showing up to appearances, as they were told—and they were arrested for it. “The Trump Administration does not care if you are complying with the law because they do not respect the rule of law,” Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez, who called for Noem’s resignation, wrote Wednesday. “They do not care if you have constitutional rights because they do not respect the Constitution.”
“They only care about the arbitrary deportation quotas set by [Stephen] Miller,” Ramirez added.
In seeking to meet those quotas, the administration may be making Americans less safe: It has diverted resources and personnel away from federal law enforcement toward arresting undocumented immigrants, and effectively discouraged migrants from appearing in court or at check-ins out of fear of being arrested.
The escalation comes after Trump officials directed immigration authorities to “turn the creative knob up to 11” and “push the envelope,” as the Guardian reported: “If it involves handcuffs on wrists,” one official said, “it’s probably worth pursuing.” It also came as Trump issued a new travel ban Wednesday evening, restricting nationals from 12 countries—Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen—from entering the United States. “We don’t want them,” Trump said in a video announcing the ban.
Trump cited the attack on Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, as he announced the executive order. But the alleged attacker—Mohamed Sabry Soliman—is a national of Egypt, which was not included in the new ban.
