Targeting the undocumented
The Trump administration has made no secret of its animus toward undocumented immigrants, and now there are numbers to back it up. On Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s California office announced that, from October through March, it had arrested more than 3,400 undocumented immigrants who weren’t facing criminal charges.
That’s a huge increase from the same period a year earlier, which includes the final three months of President Barack Obama’s term. During that previous period, the agency’s California offices arrested about 1,000 “noncriminal” undocumented immigrants.
The same trend is playing out across the country. ICE arrested more than 26,000 noncriminal undocumented immigrants during the first six months of the fiscal year, compared with a little more than 13,000 arrests of similar immigrants during the same period a year earlier.
But California has come in for special scrutiny under President Trump and acting ICE director Thomas Homan. President Trump’s meeting with conservative California officials last week — when he referred to some undocumented immigrants as “animals” and threatened criminal charges against Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for alerting the community to a potential ICE raid — was only the latest dreadful example of many.
The Trump administration is outraged over California’s new sanctuary state law. It’s not at all outrageous for California’s leadership to decide that the best use of our local law enforcement resources is fighting crime, not searching for noncriminal undocumented immigrants for ICE to arrest.
While ICE’s California office was unveiling its new arrest numbers, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was announcing a new policy barring immigration judges from putting deportation cases on hold.
Never mind that the “administrative closure” procedure has been used in hundreds of thousands of cases for immigrants who were designated low priorities for deportation.
All undocumented immigrants, it seems, are high deportation targets for this administration. That’s bad for our nation’s economy, and it’s bad for the social fabric of our communities. California must continue to insist on the right to use our resources as we see fit.