DEPORTATIONSWith New Tactics, ICE Reaches New High in Monthly Arrests
Federal immigration agents are employing new tactics — from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest — to boost their arrest numbers, leading to a new high of 51,000 arrested immigrants in July.
Federal immigration agents are employing new tactics — from arresting academics at airports to setting up a checkpoint at a popular creek in a National Forest — to boost their arrest numbers, leading to more arrests in July than in any previous month of the Trump administration.
Though it is striving to fulfill the White House’s demand for more arrests, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is still falling short of the Trump administration’s announced goal of 2,000 arrests per day. And more arrests won’t necessarily translate into more deportations, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“The focus is so much on the arrest numbers that the mission seems a little confused to the general public,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.
She noted that many of the new arrests catch non-criminals in a legal “gray area,” such as having an expired visa while applying for another legal status. Such people are hardly the “worst of the worst” the Trump administration has identified as its top targets, she said.
“Meeting some arbitrary arrest quota doesn’t necessarily serve this larger purpose of deporting a larger number of people, so there’s a disconnect about what the mission really is.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, told Stateline it arrested about 51,000 immigrants in July, up from 43,000 in June and the highest number recorded by the Trump administration. The administration did not release state specific numbers.
The department said that last month it arrested an average of 20-40 people per day at airports, as federal agents targeted passengers with expired visas. According to media reports, those arrested last month included a Cameroonian researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — a Fulbright scholar — and a University of Maryland instructor from Ethiopia who was detained as he returned from a conference where he accepted a Teacher of the Year award. Advocates suggested immigrants with expired visas should not travel without consulting an attorney.
Arrests based on expired visas are likely to continue and will accelerate in September when a new rule takes effect that sets stricter time limits on visas for students, exchange visitors and foreign media.
Michael Clemens, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins, has estimated that by limiting the number of international STEM students, instructors and researchers in the U.S., the new rule could cost the nation’s economy as much as $145 billion per year by 2035.
