White House deputy chief Stephen Miller has ordered a dramatic increase in immigration arrests, and experts say the demands are unrealistic and will lead to additional suffering.
President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff reportedly berated immigration officials during a meeting last week at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters, where he demanded 3,000 arrests a day – triple the number that agents were making in the administration's first four months.
"In the first 100 days of the Trump admin, ICE averaged 665 arrests a day," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "3,000 a day, a 450 percent increase, is an INSANE number for them to demand now; genuinely, truly, the stuff of madness."
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"Keep in mind that the 665 arrests a day that ICE averaged in the first 100 days came AFTER they already deputized thousands of other federal LEOs to carry out immigration arrests, including FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, USPIS, and more," Reichlin-Melnick added. "There's no possible way this happens. But the chaos will get worse."
Immigration officers have almost 49,000 people in ICE custody, which is far higher than Congress has approved funding to accommodate, and even as the Trump administration carries out a series of controversial deportation flights to other nations, the total number of people who have been deported are about the same as it was during president Joe Biden's last year in office.
"Many more mistakes will be made, some deadly, all with the potential to destroy the lives and livelihoods of thousands of immigrants who have followed all the rules," said labor lawyer Katelyn Oldham.
"The only way to reach these numbers is to essentially turn America into a immigration police state," added the widely followed "Sharon" account.
"I think a lot about what post-Trump justice and reconstruction might look like," posted blogger Craig Calcaterra. "It changes frequently given how much changes in the moment. The only real constant of it is that every version of it features Stephen Miller getting dragged through the streets in chains."