Deportations Up Under Trump

A round-up of immigrant round-ups

- Shikha Dalmia

Since Donald Trump's election, immigrant rights activists have been bracing themselves for mass round-ups of the estimated 11 million undocumented aliens currently in the country. As a candidate, after all, Trump cited Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback—when over a million illegal Mexicans were ejected by border patrol teams in the first year alone—as his “model.”

That hasn’t happened. But less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly radically revised the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) that Barack Obama put in place in the last few years of his term. As its name suggests, the program’s goal was to focus on deporting hardened criminals—“bad hombres,” in Trump’s telling—but largely lay off everyone else. Kelly still wants to go after the violent offenders, but he has also given Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) free rein to target practically everyone.

Before, when ICE agents raided Latino homes or communities acting on specific intel about specific bad guys, they were supposed to limit their searches to those particular targets, not go on a general hunting expedition for other undocumented residents. No more. Now agents can take anyone without a valid visa into custody for detention and deportation.