Under President Donald Trump, immigration officials have been unleashed to terrorize immigrants as they wish, often sending masked and unidentified agents to whisk them into vehicles. But things could be about to get a whole lot worse, National Immigration Center fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick fears.
That's because, according to Fox News, the Trump administration is moving forward with massive leadership changes at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that throw out all the remaining people who might have been a constraint on his agenda.
"Per four senior DHS & Trump admin sources, a mass removal of ICE leadership around the country is underway, with up to 12 ICE field office chiefs being removed & reassigned in an effort to increase deportation numbers," Fox's Bill Melugin posted to X. "I'm told the move is spearheaded by Corey Lewandowski, and a handful of the ICE Chiefs will likely be replaced by Border Patrol & CBP officials, some of whom will be hand-picked by aggressive & controversial Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino."
This matters, he said, because Border Patrol has actually been behind many operations mistakenly attributed to ICE.
"Generally speaking, ICE typically conducts very targeted operations, largely going after criminal illegal aliens or those with deportation orders, but almost always knowing who they are targeting for arrest, often conducting surveillance to learn their schedules before and waiting hours before arresting them if needed," he wrote. By contrast, "Border Patrol, under Trump 2.0 ... has been extremely aggressive and has been at the forefront of some of the most controversial immigration enforcement operations we've seen so far, carrying out roving patrols in Los Angeles, Chicago, etc, often at Home Depot, car washes, flea markets etc, leading to a handful of federal judges around the country issuing injunctions against them."
This shift is not lost on Reichlin-Melnick, who has a grim assessment of what this means.
"HUGE moment. ICE leadership is being purged tonight," he wrote. "The old guard, which prioritized targeted enforcement operations aimed at people with criminal records, is being replaced with Border Patrol and Greg Bovino's 'Midway Blitz' style."
"Think things are bad now? It'll get worse," he added.