NYT (“The Department of Deportation“):
The Department of Homeland Security has diverted thousands of federal agents from their normal duties to focus on arresting undocumented immigrants, undermining a wide range of law enforcement operations in response to mounting pressure from President Trump, a New York Times investigation has found.
Homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time, hampering their pursuit of child predators.
A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.
And federal efforts to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking have languished with investigators reassigned to help staff deportation efforts.
The changes have extended deep into D.H.S.’s public-safety mission, as the Coast Guard has diverted aircraft to transport immigrants between detention centers and the department’s law enforcement academy has delayed training for many agencies to prioritize new immigration officers.
That the Trump administration has prioritized immigration enforcement should not come as a surprise. It was one of his major campaign themes. But I would imagine most who supported that were envisioning a policy shift rather than a diversion of non-immigration-related assets.
This part of the report, though, was surprising to me:
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said that “any insinuation that the Trump administration isn’t successfully combating dangerous crime is false and uninformed.”
In fact, federal data shows that many immigrants being arrested do not have criminal records in the United States. Fewer than 40 percent of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the D.H.S. law enforcement agency leading the administration’s crackdown — have a criminal conviction, according to a Times analysis. Roughly 8 percent of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, while about 9 percent had a traffic conviction, the analysis found.
I would have guessed the percentage of the deportees with a criminal conviction would have been vanishingly small. That some 40 percent have a criminal conviction, and eight percent one for a violent crime, is stunning. (I’m assuming “traffic conviction” is a DUI or the like; routine speeding tickets and the like are civil infractions, not criminal offenses.)
The overall numbers are staggering:
[T]he number of people in immigration detention has soared past 60,000, a record tally. The Homeland Security Department says it has deported more than 550,000 people, with the daily pace of removals reaching levels not seen since the Obama administration. Illegal border crossings have fallen to their lowest point in decades.
That the Obama administration—which Trump has consistently used as a boogeyman on this issue—is a high-water mark for deportations is easy to forget.
Still, perhaps because of the performative nature of the sweeps, this feels different. I was talking yesterday afternoon with the fellow who owns the lawn service I’ve used for going on 20 years. He’s El Salvadoran and has been a legal resident for close to 30. Some of his crew, including a man who’d worked for him for many years, have been deported. Even though his papers are in order, he’s afraid to go back home to visit his 92-year-old mother because he doesn’t know if he’ll be let back in. He’s heard plenty of stories about people in his situation being denied re-entry.
As his crew was working, another crew of Latino men were on day four of repairing the outdoor pavers that were already deteriorating when we bought the house six years ago and had become dangerous. Pretty much every contractor who has worked on this house and my previous one has relied almost exclusively on Latino labor. Aside from the occasional plumber and HVAC technician, that’s the labor force around here.
Most of them, like my lawn guy and the crew rebuilding my steps, work really long hours six or seven days a week. Most of the ones that I’ve worked with often enough to get to know have raised their American citizen children to not have to work with their hands.
The lawn guy actually supports the thrust of the immigration crackdown. He thinks people should have to wait in line like he did and get admitted legally. But he’s not happy with the way ICE and DHS are going about it.
Judging by the local labor market, though, we’re likely to regret the thrust of the policy, not just the cruelty of it. I don’t envision a surge of native-born Americans scrambling to replace the workers being deported.
