People attending recent mandatory immigration check-ins or court appearances have been escorted out in federal custody after the Trump administration allegedly tricked, lied to or otherwise deceived them as part of its mass deportation campaign.
Amid a blitz of immigration-related policy changes over the last few weeks, Donald Trump and his subordinates have greenlit the ability of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to conduct potential civil enforcement operations at courthouses, including in immigration courts.
They have also reportedly set daily arrest quotas between at least 1,200 and 1,500 and gotten angry when agents have not consistently met those targets – pressure from the top that is probably incentivizing officers on the ground to go after the lowest-hanging fruit instead of people with serious criminal records.
There’s no lower-hanging fruit than immigrants following the rules, who reliably show up when they are called in for immigration check-ins or court dates. And, already, anecdotes from around the country demonstrate how Ice is setting traps for people to walk into as their family members look on, helpless.
Attorneys in New York say dozens of their clients have been detained and deported after reporting for seemingly routine check-ins related to their immigration cases since Trump’s electoral victory in November. Two of them, a mother and her young daughter, didn’t even know they had lost their appeal to stay in the US when they arrived for their appointment. They were deported the next day.
For others in New York state, Ice check-ins now mean confiscated passports, ankle monitor requirements and fingerprinting for kids. In neighboring New Jersey, non-citizens are being arrested at their appointments as well. And in Florida, family members and advocates have accused immigration enforcement officials of luring community members into a government contractor’s office, supposedly to fix an issue with their monitoring device or to sign a paper, only to take them into custody.
One of the people affected by these tactics was a Miami-Dade county middle school science teacher who had lived in the US since he was 13 years old and reportedly had Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) legal protections, which meant he should have been deprioritized for deportation. Despite that, he was arrested at his regular immigration appointment just before Trump was inaugurated and has since been returned to Honduras.
Elsewhere, a father of four who had lived in the US for two decades and whose only infraction was a traffic stop was told at his 22 January check-in outside Cleveland, Ohio, that he had two weeks to buy a flight returning to Guatemala in February, or else Ice would track him down.
And a week later, in an Ogden, Utah, court for relatively minor offenses, Ice was waiting for a man who pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor of impaired driving. The man’s wife and daughter had to stand by while they learned immigration agents would whisk their loved one away, and even the judge was regretful, saying he didn’t know Ice would be there and using the word “triste” – “sad” in Spanish – to describe his remorse.
From this flurry of reports, it’s clear that the Trump administration is catching immigrants long in the US, many of whom have negligible or no criminal histories, in its dragnet of enhanced enforcement.
By arresting people who actually report for required meetings and adjudications, officials are also in effect punishing them for not absconding. And while there has always been a risk of apprehension at Ice check-ins, it’s a seemingly counterintuitive approach to improving immigration enforcement to harm those who regularly come forward as they are directed.
Similar concerns exist around enforcement actions at court – and especially immigration courts. When non-citizens don’t show up for their immigration proceedings, they are often ordered removed as a no-show. Yet, if word circulates that Ice agents are hanging around immigration court buildings, that may very well dissuade defendants, witnesses and family members from attending hearings based on fears they could become collateral damage during an operation, even if theyhave done nothing wrong except remain in the country without permission.
This strategy targeting those who are complying with what Ice and the courts tell them to do also reveals a certain level of shortsightedness within the administration. Trump’s voracious appetite for more and more immigration arrests may be somewhat sated for the moment if officers go after people who are the easiest to snag because they literally turn themselves in by appearing for check-ins and hearings. But immigrant communities are smart with strong networks, and soon people will hear about the dangers of attending.
Then, Ice will probably lose that pipeline of detentions and deportations. Meanwhile, the country will be worse off when immigrants with legitimate pathways are prevented from pursuing them. And instead of the orderly immigration adjudication process ostensibly intended by these measures, more chaos is likely to ensue as fear takes hold.
In the meantime, students are missing their science teacher. Children are saying goodbye to their fathers. And it’s unclear that the US public is safer because of any of it.
