ICE agents get new arrest and deportation guidelines

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued broad new directives to immigration officers Thursday, saying the fact that someone is an undocumented immigrant “should not alone be the basis” of a decision to detain and deport them from the United States.

The Biden administration will continue to prioritize the arrest and deportation of immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety and those who recently crossed a border illegally into the United States, Mayorkas said in an interview.

Mayorkas said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should not attempt to arrest and deport farmworkers, the elderly and others who were vulnerable to deportation under the Trump administration, which allowed agents to arrest anyone in the United States illegally. He also said agents should avoid detaining immigrants who land on their radar because they spoke out against “unscrupulous” landlords or employers, or at public demonstrations.

The new rules take effect Nov. 29.

“The overriding question is whether the noncitizen poses a current threat to public safety,” Mayorkas wrote in a memo to immigration and border agency heads Thursday.

“Are we going to spend the time apprehending and removing the farmworker who is breaking his or her back to pick fruit that we all put on our tables?” Mayorkas said in the interview. “Because if we pursue that individual, we will not be spending those same resources on somebody who does, in fact, threaten our safety. And that is what this is about.”

But the secretary also granted ICE agents far more discretion to decide whether to deport someone than officials did in the agency’s interim guidance Feb. 18, which required supervisors to sign off on some deportation cases to make sure agents followed the rules.

Mayorkas said he would monitor data showing agents’ compliance with the guidelines but would not micromanage them.

“I do trust the ICE workforce, and I do trust ICE leadership, and I do have confidence in my own leadership and the efforts that I have made engaging with the ICE workforce and discussing with them these very issues,” he said.

Mayorkas issued the new instructions to immigration agents at a critical juncture for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of whom have lived here for years, and for the controversial federal agency in charge of enforcing the immigration laws.

President Joe Biden has pledged to fight for a path to citizenship for them this year, but talks with Republicans have collapsed amid a new influx of migrants at the Southwest border, and the Senate has hit back-toback roadblocks in its effort to include a legalization process in the budget, with the Senate parliamentarian rejecting another proposal this week.

The left wing of the Democratic Party has called for officials to abolish ICE, saying it is secretive and difficult to monitor. Hundreds of state and local jurisdictions are so wary of the agency — saying they have sought to remove people who do not pose a threat, such as minivan-driving parents or relatives of people in the military — that they have limited their police and jails from working with them.

Republicans have slammed ICE for a dramatic drop in immigration arrests this year and filed lawsuits against the Biden administration, alleging that it has abdicated its responsibility to enforce federal immigration laws. Immigration arrests fell from 6,000 in December to 3,600 in August, according to ICE data.