Santiago
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ICE Agents Are Losing Patience
ICE Agents Are Losing Patience with Trump’s Chaotic Immigration Policy
By Jonathan Blitzer
June 24, 2019
Last Monday, when President Trump tweeted that his Administration would stage nationwide immigration raids the following week, with the goal of
deporting “millions of illegal aliens,” agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were suddenly forced to scramble. The agency was not ready
to carry out such a large operation. Preparations that would typically take field officers six to eight weeks were compressed into a few days, and,
because of Trump’s tweet, the officers would be entering communities that now knew they were coming. “It was a dumb-chit political move that will
only hurt the agents,” John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff at ICE, told me. On Saturday, hours before the operation was supposed to start in
ten major cities across the country, the President changed course, delaying it for another two weeks.
On Sunday, I spoke to an ICE officer about the week’s events. “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation,” the officer said. “It was
a boondoggle, a nightmare.” Even on the eve of the operation, many of the most important details remained unresolved. “This was a family op. So
where are we going to put the families? There’s no room to detain them, so are we going to put them in hotels?” the officer said. On Friday, an
answer came down from ICE leadership: the families would be placed in hotels while ICE figured out what to do with them. That, in turn, raised other
questions. “So the families are in hotels, but who’s going to watch them?” the officer continued. “What happens if the person we arrest has a
U.S.-citizen child? What do we do with the children? Do we need to get booster seats for the vans? Should we get the kids toys to play with?”
Trump’s tweet broadcasting the operation had also created a safety issue for the officers involved. “No police agency goes out and says,
‘Tomorrow, between four and eight, we’re going to be in these neighborhoods,’ ” the officer said.
The idea for the operation took hold in the White House last September, two months after a federal judge had ordered the government to stop separating
parents and children at the border. At the time, the number of families seeking asylum was rising steadily, and Administration officials were
determined to toughen enforcement. A D.H.S. official told me that, in the months before the operation was proposed, “a major focus” of department
meetings “was concern about the fact that people on the non-detained docket”—asylum seekers released into the U.S. with a future court
date—“are almost never deported.” By January, a tentative plan had materialized. The Department of Justice developed a “rocket docket” to
prioritize the cases of asylum seekers who’d just arrived in the country and missed a court date—in their absence, the government could swiftly
secure deportation orders against them.
D.H.S. then created a “target list” of roughly twenty-five hundred immigrant family members across the country for deportation; eventually, the
Administration aimed to arrest ten thousand people using these methods.
From the start, however, the plan faced resistance. The Secretary of D.H.S., Kirstjen Nielsen, argued that the arrests would be complicated to carry
out, in part, because American children would be involved. (Many were born in the U.S. to parents on the “target list.”) Resources were already
limited, and an operation on this scale would divert attention from the border, where a humanitarian crisis was worsening by the day. The acting head
of ICE, Ron Vitiello, a tough-minded former Border Patrol officer, shared Nielsen’s concerns. According to the Washington Post, these reservations
weren’t “ethical” so much as logistical: executing such a vast operation would be extremely difficult, with multiple moving pieces, and the
optics could be devastating.
Four months later, Trump effectively fired them. Vitiello’s replacement at ICE, an official named Mark Morgan—who’s already been fired once by
Trump and regained the President’s support after making a series of appearances on Fox News—subsequently announced that ICE would proceed with the
operation.
Late last week, factions within the Administration clashed over what to do. The acting secretary of D.H.S., Kevin McAleenan, urged caution, claiming
that the operation was a distraction and a waste of manpower. Among other things, a $4.5 billion funding bill to supply further humanitarian aid at
the border has been held up because Democrats worried that the Administration would use the money for enforcement operations.
McAleenan had been meeting with members of both parties on the Hill, and there appeared to be signs of progress, before the President announced the
ICE crackdown. According to an Administration official, McAleenan argued that the operation would also threaten a string of recent gains made by the
President. The Trump Administration had just secured a deal with the Mexican government to increase enforcement at the Guatemalan border, and it
expanded a massive new program called Remain in Mexico, which has forced some ten thousand asylum seekers to wait indefinitely in northern Mexico.
“Momentum was moving in the right direction,” the official said.
On the other side of the argument were Stephen Miller, at the White House, and Mark Morgan, at ICE. In the days before and after Trump’s Twitter
announcement, Morgan spoke regularly with the President, who was circumventing McAleenan, Morgan’s boss. In meetings with staff, Morgan boasted that
he had a direct line to the President, according to the ICE officer, who told me it was highly unusual for there to be such direct contact between the
agency head and the White House. “It should be going to the Secretary, which I find hilarious, actually, because Morgan was already fired once by
this Administration,” the officer said.
Over the weekend, the President agreed to halt the operation. But it’s far from certain whether McAleenan actually got the upper hand. Officials in
the White House authorized ICE to issue a press release insinuating that someone had leaked important details about the operation and therefore
compromised it. “Any leak telegraphing sensitive law-enforcement operations is egregious and puts our officers’ safety in danger,” an ICE
spokesperson said late Saturday afternoon. This was a puzzling statement given that it was Trump who first publicized the information about the
operation. But the White House’s line followed a different script : some members of the Administration, as well as the former head of ICE, Thomas
Homan, were publicly accusing McAleenan of sharing information with reporters in an attempt to undermine the operation.
For Homan, his involvement in the Administration’s internal fight marked an unexpected return to the main stage. Last year, he resigned as acting
head of ICE after the Senate refused to confirm him to the post. Earlier this month, Trump announced, on Fox News, that Homan would be returning to
the Administration as the President’s new border tsar, but Homan, who hadn’t been informed of the decision, has remained noncommittal.
Still, according to the Administration official, Homan and the President talk by phone regularly. Over the weekend, Homan, who has since become an
on-air contributor to Fox News, appeared on television to attack McAleenan personally. “You’ve got the acting Secretary of Homeland Security
resisting what ICE is trying to do,” he said.
Meanwhile, the President spent the weekend trying to leverage the delayed operation to pressure congressional Democrats. If they did not agree to a
complete overhaul of the asylum system at the border, Trump said, he’d greenlight the ICE operation once more. “Two weeks,” he tweeted, “and
big Deportation begins.” At the same time, his Administration was under fire for holding immigrant children at a Border Patrol facility in Clint,
Texas. Two hundred and fifty infants, children, and teen-agers have spent weeks in squalid conditions; they have been denied food, water, soap, and
toothbrushes, and there’s limited access to medicine in the wake of flu and lice outbreaks. “If the Democrats would change the asylum laws and the
loop
holes,” Trump said, “everything would be solved immediately.”
And yet, last week, when an Administration lawyer appeared before the Ninth Circuit to answer for the conditions at the facility, which were in clear
violation of a federal agreement on the treatment of children in detention, she said that addressing them was not the government’s responsibility.
Michelle Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, told me, “The Administration is intentionally creating chaos at the border and detaining
children in abusive conditions for political gain.” (On Monday, Customs and Border Protection transferred all but thirty children from the Clint
facility; it isn’t yet clear where, exactly, they’ll go.)
President Obama was never popular among ICE’s rank and file, but the detailed list of enforcement priorities he instituted, in 2014, which many in
the agency initially resented as micromanagement, now seemed more sensible—and even preferable to the current state of affairs. The ICE officer
said, “One person told me, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the Obama rules. We removed more people with the rules we had in place than
with all this. It was much easier when we had the priorities. It was cleaner.’ ” Since the creation of ICE, in 2003, enforcement was premised on
the idea that officers would primarily go after criminals for deportation; Trump, who views ICE as a political tool to showcase his toughness, has
abandoned that framework entirely. “I don’t even know what we’re doing now,” the officer said. “A lot of us see the photos of the kids at
the border, and we’re wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” The influx of Central American migrants, the officer noted, has been an issue
for more than a decade now, spanning three Presidential administrations. “No one built up the infrastructure to handle this, and now people are
suffering at the border for it. They keep saying they were caught flat footed. That’s a bald-faced f***ing lie.”
Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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SFandH
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Thanks, informative article.
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Bajazly
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Wow! Nothing like a clear and present streamlined plan... Or NOT!!
Believing is religion - Knowing is science
Harald Pietschmann
"Get off the beaten path and memories, friends and new techniques are developed"
Bajazly, August 2019
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John Harper
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Trump's not interested in doing anything, he just wants the fools to believe he's doing something. If he did something, he might have to take
responsibility and accountability. Not part of his tool chest.
Breaking eggs and rattling pots and pans does not make you a chef.
John
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by John Harper]
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SFandH
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What is the "loophole" in immigration laws that Trump is talking about? How does he want the laws changed?
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by SFandH]
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Beagle
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Quote: Originally posted by SFandH  | What is the "loophole" in immigration laws that Trump is talking about? How does he want the laws changed?
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by SFandH] |
Don't ever quote his vocabulary and expect it to mean the same thing to the rest of the world. This "loophole" is probably the thing that allowed his
wife's parents to have legal status but it's a "loophole" if some darker skinned people, his base hates are using it.
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by Beagle]Edit-words and stuff
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by Beagle]
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SFandH
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I think it has to do with the asylum laws, but specifically what I don't know. You can't just end the idea of asylum, that would be an immoral,
disgusting thing to do.
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Bajazly
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And your point is?
Believing is religion - Knowing is science
Harald Pietschmann
"Get off the beaten path and memories, friends and new techniques are developed"
Bajazly, August 2019
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SFandH
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I guess my point is nobody would agree to it.
So what does he want changed?
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by SFandH]
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Bajazly
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None of it is based in reality, all just campaigning
and trying to make the dems look like asses.
Believing is religion - Knowing is science
Harald Pietschmann
"Get off the beaten path and memories, friends and new techniques are developed"
Bajazly, August 2019
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pacificobob
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| Quote: Originally posted by John Harper | Trump's not interested in doing anything, he just wants the fools to believe he's doing something. If he did something, he might have to take
responsibility and accountability. Not part of his tool chest.
Breaking eggs and rattling pots and pans does not make you a chef.
John
[Edited on 6-25-2019 by John Harper] |
well said john.
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