Instances of federal immigration officers firing or drawing guns have surged under President Donald Trump’s second term, a trend investigative journalist Caitlin Dickerson linked to a recent chilling message from top Trump aide Stephen Miller.
Appearing on The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show” Friday, Dickerson was asked to comment on a statement Miller issued last week to the tens of thousands of ICE agents across the nation.
“To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties,” Miller told Fox News last week.
“Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one – no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist – can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
Miller’s message, Dickerson warned, was essentially a blank check to all ICE officials to conduct themselves however they saw fit, so long as it produced arrests for the Trump administration.
“I make of that that Miller’s trying to communicate to ICE and to these new members of ICE, in particular, that they will not face consequences for use of force, specifically,” Dickerson said.
“I think he’s speaking to the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minnesota and killed her but also to officers who’ve used tear gas, who’ve pushed and shoved and arrested protesters, who’ve claimed that people who are filming them are impeding arrests and using that as a pretense to either take those people into custody or have some sort of violent altercation with them. It’s very striking.”
Thousands of ICE agents are currently swarming the state of Minnesota in the wake of the controversial investigation into Somali daycares, as well as in the wake of the fatal ICE shooting of Good, which has prompted what appeared to be thousands of Minnesotans to take to the street in protest. Additionally, thousands of Minnesotans are participating in a statewide general strike Friday to further oppose ICE’s presence in the state.
Trump’s immigration policy, however, has proved wildly unpopular with Americans, dropping from plus 18 points at the beginning of his presidency to minus 8 as of Monday, per new CNN polling. Of the more than 328,000 migrants arrested since last January, nearly three quarters had no criminal record, and in spite of Trump’s pledge to target only the “worst of the worst.”