Those who lived through it describe the ICE raids as a “siege” or an “occupation”.
At the height of the raids last year, agents in armored military vehicles rolled through residential neighborhoods. Masked agents patrolled public parks and stationed themselves outside elementary schools; squadrons of ICE agents snatched pedestrians off the streets.
Then, officers killed two US citizens during an ICE “blitz” on Minneapolis. After a public backlash, the Trump administration said it would try a new approach.
“I learned that maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch,” Donald Trump said in February. He chose a new secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, who promised to cut the flash and fanfare. “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said at his Senate confirmation hearing in March.
Six months on, that’s what his agency has delivered.
Now ICE is anywhere and everywhere, embedded in all corners of everyday life.
A Cuban man in Miami who stepped outside his house to take out the trash was detained moments after he had dropped the garbage bag into the bin. An Ecuadorian father was arrested in Danbury, Connecticut, just after seeing his six-year-old son onto the school bus. People have been arrested while pumping gas, leaving behind their empty cars. They are arrested on their way to work, or on their way home.
Y, a Venezuelan native, was stopped at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport by immigration officers whom he said wouldn’t tell him why he was being arrested, or accept proof of a judicial order expressly prohibiting deportation to his home country. Four days later, he was on an airplane departing to Venezuela. Just before takeoff, he was deboarded – ICE officers admitted they may have made a mistake.
Though agents appear to be moving with more stealth than they were before, ICE arrests are still, often, violent. Glimpses of that violence are – despite Mullin’s initial intentions – still making national headlines.
Last week, an ICE agent shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in Austin, Texas. The Venezuelan asylum seeker, who had received a deportation order after missing a letter to appear in immigration court, was discharged from a local hospital with a bullet still lodged near his spine and then taken to ICE detention. That same day, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a Guatemalan man died in a fiery crash while fleeing federal immigration agents.
Still, for every arrest that breaks through into public view, countless others happen quickly, before anyone can notice. “The detentions are happening in a flash – we’re talking, like, 90 seconds from the time ICE shows up to that person being driven away,” Willis said. “And often they are moving very quietly, with very soft feet.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the US government agency that oversees ICE, declined to comment on how its tactics had changed. “DHS will not disclose or discuss law enforcement operations, strategy or tactics,” said Chandler Rebel, a spokesperson for the agency. But Rebel confirmed the agency’s focus on airports, noting DHS is “working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport”.
Bolstered by $75bn in funding from Congress, the Department of Homeland Security – the US government agency that oversees ICE – has more than doubled its workforce this year to more than 22,000 officers and staff. It has also vastly expanded its capacity by working with local police, sheriffs, highway patrol and even fish and wildlife agents. As of 15 September, ICE has signed more than 2,500 287(g) agreements.
ICE is now detaining more immigrants than ever before.
An expanded dragnet fueled by police partnerships
“The administration is able to essentially hide a multiplied ICE force not only in unmarked cars, and not only behind masks, but also within local law enforcement through the 287(g) program,” said Willis. “I call it the invisibilizing of immigration enforcement.”
Operations that now originate with local police are taking place across the country.
At the El Corralón bar in Memphis on 29 August, an operation that began as a police raid targeting illegal gambling and drugs turned into one of the largest sweeps of undocumented immigrants in Tennessee – 120 people were detained. Immigration agents worked with state law enforcement to execute search warrants at the bar related to drugs and gambling, and targeting the bar’s owner. But then, at 1am that night, more than a dozen agents walked into the bar, shut off the music, instructed everyone to gather on the dance floor and asked them one by one if they had legal status, according to witnesses.
A spokesperson for the DHS said partnerships with law enforcement were key to the agency’s immigration enforcement. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us,” said Rebel.
Lawyers across the US said they worry that local law enforcement aren’t adequately aware of the nuances of immigration policy. “People are getting detained if they don’t have their green card on them. They’re getting stopped even if they have legal status,” said Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an immigration attorney based in Austin.
Last month, her client Brian José Morales García, 25, was deported to Mexico despite repeatedly telling officers that he was a US citizen, born in Denver.
Morales García was on his way to work as an air-conditioning installation tech, riding with his boss, when officers from the Gillespie county sheriff’s department and the Texas department of public safety (DPS) pulled them over. Both law enforcement agencies were working with ICE. Morales García told the officers that he had his birth certificate and social security card at home, but they didn’t believe him. Days later, he was deported to Mexico.
Eventually, the federal government reached an agreement with Morales García’s lawyers to let him back into the country, after Lincoln-Goldfinch submitted documents proving his citizenship.
“We’re seeing a lot of racial profiling,” she said. Local law enforcement appear to be especially active in Hispanic neighborhoods, she said, or in areas where Latino construction workers gather.
“They might have their sights set on a big job site, in some neighborhood under construction, and just slowly patrol that site and just take people in day after day until nobody’s going to work there anymore,” she said.
‘New pathways to deportation’
The Trump administration has also relentlessly reshaped immigration policies and bent the country’s vast bureaucracy to advance its mass-deportation agenda and boost arrest numbers.
“In order to sustain those numbers, they have to create more categories of people who can be subject to detention,” said Willis. “They do this by creating new pathways to deportation.”
In recent months, the supreme court cleared the way for the administration to end temporary humanitarian protections for 350,000 Haitians and Syrians in the US and made it easier to end protections for a total of about 1.3 million immigrants from a number of countries designated for temporary protected status (TPS). Currently, about 170,000 Salvadorians living in the US are anxiously waiting for the administration to announce whether it will renew or axe the same protections for them.
At the same time, the administration unrolled a new tactic of scheduling “mega-master” hearings – mass hearings in immigration courts, scheduled at the last minute so that many people do not know to, or are unable to, attend their mandatory court appointments. The no-shows are then ordered removed from the country in absentia, making them immediately subject to arrest and deportation.
After attorneys began reporting such hearings in May, judges issued 53,808 removal orders in absentia in June – a 55% increase. More than 13,000 of those removal orders followed mass hearings with a hundred or more people, according to researchers Joseph Gunther and Brandon Marrow, who created the site bklg.org to track and analyze procedural immigration data.
In the coming weeks, the Trump administration is also expected to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners. It has implemented a rule allowing officials to block people from becoming lawful permanent residents if they or certain relatives use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps or even student financial aid.
It is also increasingly pursuing “third-country” deportation agreements, so it can arrest and remove immigrants who were previously immune to removal because a judge had deemed that they would face torture or persecution if they were returned to their home countries. Now, more than 23,000 people over the last year have been expelled to countries where they have never been and where they have no ties. Some of these deportations are to countries with civil unrest, political instability, armed conflict and known human rights abuses.
There are constantly shifting rules about who can or cannot be detained or deported, and for how long. And there are constantly shifting norms on who will be detained or deported.
On one day, a client might go to an ICE check-in and leave without incident, Willis said. The next day, a different client with the same immigration status might be detained. “It makes it very hard to counsel people,” Willis said. “It’s very hard to prepare people for what they can expect.”
Pressured to self-deport
Not everyone who is arrested is immediately deportable – many people have pending immigration cases, or legal status. Indeed, there is a wide gulf between the number of people ICE is detaining each month, and the number of people who are deported.
Many of the people who are arrested languish in detention for months. Others – even those who may have a good chance of gaining asylum or another legal status – choose to accept voluntary deportation rather than wait months or years for their immigration case to process.
Federal circuit courts are currently split on whether immigrants who came to the US without lawful admission, including many asylum seekers, can be detained indefinitely without access to bond hearings. In some states, including Texas, the prospect of spending years inside a detention center can wear on immigrants.
“Almost every single detained parent that I talk to has been pressured into signing a voluntary deportation,” said Lincoln-Goldfinch. “Because they are told that if they sign, they get to go home and they can choose what happens to their kids.”
The Guardian is not using full names in some instances to protect sources’ privacy and safety
