President Trump’s mass deportation plan has not yet taken hold, but you wouldn’t know that from the White House PR campaign.
The administration has blitzed the airwaves and social media feeds with announcements of enforcement actions by Immigration and Customs and Enforcement. White House social media accounts post photos of shackled migrants being loaded onto military aircraft. Raids have been unusually public — with even “Dr. Phil” allowed to film an operation in Chicago.
Yet the number of daily Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, trumpeted each day on X, are still about where they were at times under President Obama, reports Politico. Many of those detained have no violent criminal history and thousands have been quietly released for lack of detention capacity. Drugs and illegal immigrants are still slipping across the border each day.
“Politically, I understand why they’re doing this,” said John Sandweg, acting director of ICE from 2013 to 2014. “But I think it sends messages that are inaccurate about what ICE has historically done — that this is new.”
The far-reaching media grab speaks to the challenges the Trump administration faces as it tries to fulfill the mass deportations promise, an ambitious undertaking that will take funding, time and resources to scale up.
Even if successful, the effort faces political risk, given that Trump’s operation is not only targeting violent criminal offenders.
A White House official disputed the notion that Trump’s actions are mere window dressing, pointing to the president’s tariff deals, the national emergency declaration, the use of the military to secure the border and his roll back of Biden era policies — all moves that drastically altered the nation’s treatment of immigrants.
S,id White House spokesperson Kush Desai, “After four years of a lackadaisical approach to border security and immigration, every lever of executive power is now being marshaled to enforce our laws, mass deport criminal illegal immigrants, safeguard our borders, and put American citizens first.”
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“These people never stop campaigning, and Trump and his team — Iook, they’re much savvier, they’re hungrier and unrelenting,” said Beatriz Lopez of Immigration Hub, a pro-immigrant group that launched during Trump’s first administration. “And part of it is doing what Trump does best, which is entertainment and cruelty.’”
“The only way to really increase arrests and detention is to just increase the overall number of people that don’t have criminal records,” said Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher at Syracuse University.