ICE gearing up to deport one million immigrants
“I get people sending me text messages, people calling me, saying ‘thank you for what you’re doing,’” he said Sunday. “They’re not saying it publicly. And I think that’s a problem for our country, it’s a problem for the Republican Party, it’s a problem for the Democratic Party when people aren’t allowed to speak out.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Amash said, is taking the opposite approach by refusing to call for impeachment hearings.
“From a principled, moral position, she’s making a mistake. From a strategic position, she’s making a mistake,” he said on “State of the Union.” “If she believes, as I do, that there’s impeachable conduct in there, then she should say so. She should tell the American people, “We’re going to move forward with impeachment hearings and potentially articles of impeachment.’”
Pelosi argued in early May that impeachment would be “the easy way out” for Republicans who are “complicit in the special-interest agenda,” because they know the effort would “end at the Senate’s edge.” Even if the article of impeachment passed the House, it would still have to receive support from two-thirds of the Senate, meaning at least 20 Republicans would have to cross the party line.
Last week, Amash declared his independence from the Republican Party, calling for an end to “partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”
“Great news for the Republican Party as one of the dumbest & most disloyal men in Congress is ‘quitting’ the Party,” Trump tweeted in response. “Knew he couldn’t get the nomination to run again in the Great State of Michigan. Already being challenged for his seat. A total loser!” With no immigration reform from Congress, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants who’ve been denied asylum or are considered dangerous.
President Trump had set a two-week deadline for Congress to come up with asylum reforms on June 22. Now, ICE is “ready to just perform their mission, which is to go and find, detain and then deport the approximately 1 million people who have final removal orders,” acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.
“They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders,” he said of the targeted migrants.
Cuccinelli said the deportation halt had clogged the immigration system, and was contributing to massive numbers of migrants being detained at border facilities.
ICE is the “second stage of the border crisis,” Cuccinelli said. “We focus so much on the Border Patrol. But the reason you see overcrowding in those facilities is because they can’t be moved to the facilities where they were expected to go.”
Those ICE facilities “themselves are over capacity,” he added. “The whole pipeline is clogged, and ICE is backing up the Border Patrol in the southwest border.”
Trump on Friday had hinted deportations would start “fairly soon,” but the numbers the administration aimed to deport were never revealed.
Deportation figures were higher under President Barack Obama, when about 410,000 undocumented immigrants were sent home in 2012, according to reports. So far, Trump has deported a little more than half that number annually.
Trump claimed last month he’d soon be deporting “millions,” but it was not clear how that would get carried out given current immigration staffing levels.