Mass Arrests Of Immigrant Families To Begin, Despite Warnings By Homeland Security
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to conduct mass arrests of migrants in as many as 10 American cities beginning on Sunday, the Washington Post reported.
The administration had reportedly considered the proposal before, but officials’ objections had stalled the plan. Even now, the Post reported, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan has concerns about the operation. While the current plan will reportedly target as many as 2,000 immigrant families in the country, he has reportedly suggested a smaller scale effort that would only go after 150 families.
The report explained:
McAleenan has warned that an indiscriminate operation to arrest migrants in their homes and at work sites risks separating children from their parents in cases where the children are at day care, summer camp or friend’s houses and not present for the raids. He also has maintained that ICE should not devote major resources to carrying out a mass interior sweep while telling lawmakers it needs emergency funding to address the crisis at the U.S. border.
And while the operation — dubbed the ‘Family Op’ — ostensibly only targets undocumented immigrants, the reporting indicates it will include wide-reaching arrests, suggesting that some people not eligible for deportation could get erroneously detained:
ICE agents have limited intelligence on the locations of the families with court-ordered deportations beyond their last known addresses. But White House and ICE officials believe agents will be able to make many “collateral arrests” by vacuuming up foreigners living in the country illegally at or near the target locations.
Even if the operation goes off entirely as planned, however, it would constitute a devastating attack on immigrant communities, capriciously destroying families and traumatizing children.
The open animus behind the effort is glaring. Since there are millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, immigration enforcement is invariably about making decisions about which enforcement actions to prioritize. Under President Barack Obama, the administration moved toward focusing on deportations of immigrants who committed serious crimes.
By focusing instead on families, Trump reveals that “crime” isn’t really what he cares about in immigration enforcement — even as he uses false suggestions of immigrant criminality to justify targeting immigrants in the first place. If the government actually cares about reducing crime, it can focus its limited resources on responding to actual crimes. If what it really cares about, though, is making the lives of immigrant families worse and pleasing racist voters, then the “Family Op” fits the bill.
IMAGE: Relatives separated by deportation and immigration hug at the border during a brief reunification meeting at the banks of the Rio Bravo, a natural border between U.S. and Mexico, October 29, 2016. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez/File Photo
