They are the most visible symbol of what American president Donald Trump promises will be “the biggest mass deportation in history”.
They are the officers armed with immigration and the application of customs (ice), often masked and unidentified, wearing simple clothes under protective vests, stopping people in cities across the country.
The ice made about three times more arrests from May to July compared to the same period last year, according to the latest figures from the government obtained through a request for freedom of information by the Expulsion data projectDirected by the California University of California University School.
But these same figures do not show a comparable increase in the number of people with criminal history which are picked up by ice. According to data, approximately half of the 61,000 people currently detained in immigration detention have neither a criminal record nor a criminal accusation.
The proof denies the affirmation of the Trump administration according to which its repression of immigration aims “the worst of the worst,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, political analyst and lawyer for the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC
Bush-Joseph claims that statistics reflect tactics that the officers that ice agents use to considerably increase their number of arrests under the direction of the White House.
“They go to places where they think there will be many unauthorized immigrants and try to stop as many people as possible,” she told CBC News, “people who go to the American immigration courts for their asylum hearings and their asylum offices are arrested and detained”.
Approval of the Supreme Court
The data show that the arrests of immigration at the national level were on average about 300 per day throughout 2024. After the inauguration of Trump in January, the arrests doubled almost overnight at around 600 per day, then again enriched in May, reaching more than 1000 per day in June.
Critics have criticized the Trump administration for ICE tactics to be randomly apprehending non -white men, in particular Latinos, in sweeping where undocumented migrants live or work.
A decision from the United States Supreme Court this week has approved such tactics – at least for the moment.
In a 6-3 DecisionThe conservative majority of the Court raised a California judge order which had temporarily prohibited agents from preventing people only according to their race, language, work or location.
President Donald Trump marked a legal victory on Monday when the Supreme Court raised the limits of a federal judge on immigration judgments in Los Angeles. Critics warn that the decision could lead to more aggressive ice raids and blind arrests.
But the decision of the Supreme Court is not the last word in the case.
The courts have not yet heard the complete arguments on the question of whether tactics violate the protections of the American Constitution against unreasonable arrest. A hearing is scheduled for September 24 to a district court in California, and the case should be in the hands of the Supreme Court in the coming months.
Mike Fox, a legal scholarship holder of the Cato Institute, a libertarian reflection group in Washington, said that Ice uses unconstitutional methods to increase the number of migrants he stops.
“The figures will be much lower if you focus on the violent people you should focus on,” said Fox. “It is much easier to stand outside a house depot and make people.”
Fox says he believes that most Americans want the ice to target violent offenders for expulsion, not “someone who came here for a better life … trying to earn a honest living”.
The Trump administration insists that its approach works.
“Due to this unprecedented effort, dozens of gang members and national security threats have been removed from our streets,” said a white house press release Tuesday.
During a white house briefing on Tuesday, when a journalist asked questions about the concerns of American citizens to be broken in the application of the Immigration Act, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, postponed the question.
“They should not be concerned because this administration focuses on the detention and expulsion of illegal foreign criminals that have violated the immigration laws of our country,” she said.
“When the ice comes out to carry out a targeted operation to expel the illegal criminals from our community, they do it with information … In most cases with the support of local police who know exactly where these illegal extraterrestrial criminals and drug traffickers and drug traffickers are hiding well.”
While the White House loves highlight violent criminals picked up by ice and deceive the drop in illegal passages from the border with Mexico, reaching its objective To expel one million migrants per year seems impossible without attacking people who have no criminal history.
According to the own ICE figures, made public in a Letter to a member of the Congress Last September, the agency followed approximately 425,000 immigrants with criminal convictions that were not in detention and 222,000 others with pending criminal charges. (Approximately 20% of the total combined was sentenced or accused of traffic offenses.)
Even if each of these immigrants with convictions or accusations is held and expelled within one year, this leaves the administration to around 350,000 less from the objective.
“While the application of the immigration law increases, the percent of those of arrested who are found guilty of a crime decreases,” said the immigration research initiative, a non -partisan and non -partisan reflection group funded by the charity of the NEO Foundation, in its analysis Data from the first six months following the inauguration of Trump.
Another non -profit non -support organization revealed that the administration had increased its volume of immigration arrests in a “blind and non -focalized” manner.
“The Trump administration’s dispersion approach in terms of execution simultaneously targets long -standing residents, those who have no criminal record, undocumented families, migrant children, undocumented workers and random people,” said American immigration coucil, in a report Posted at the end of July.
