After watching for about two hours, he said, “I think that’s Tango,” using a term for target. “Gray hoodie. Backpack. Walking quickly.” The immigra
After watching for about two hours, he said, “I think that’s Tango,” using a term for target. “Gray hoodie. Backpack. Walking quickly.”
The immigration officers surrounded and handcuffed a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor.
Kenneth Genalo, head of Enforcement and Removal Operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, said a popular misconception is that officers can sweep into a community and pick up a wide swath of people who are in the United States illegally and send them to their home countries.
“It’s called targeted enforcement,” Genalo said.
“We don’t grab people, but we take them to JFK and put them on a plane.”
With Donald Trump returning to the White House, there is intense interest in how the Republican will carry out his immigration agenda, including a campaign pledge of mass deportations.
His priorities could run into the realities faced by agents focused on enforcement and removals, including the unit in New York that offered The Associated Press a glimpse into its operations: The number of people already on its lists to target eclipses the number of officers available to do the work.
The Biden administration had narrowed deportation priorities to public safety threats and recent border crossers. Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, says officials in the new administration also will prioritize those who pose a risk, such as criminals, before moving on to immigrants whom courts have ordered removed from the U.S.
But Homan also has signaled that enforcement could be wider: “If you’re in the country illegally you got a problem,” he said recently on Dr. Phil’s Merit TV.
It’s a tall order.
Deportation orders far outnumber staff
About 1.4 million people have final orders of removal, while about 660,000 under immigration supervision either have been convicted of crimes or are facing charges.
However, only 6,000 officers within ICE are tasked with monitoring noncitizens in the country and then finding and removing those not eligible to stay.
Those staffing numbers have largely remained static as their caseload has roughly quadrupled over the past decade to 7.6 million.
About 10% of that workforce was pulled from their regular duties last year to go to the U.S.-Mexico border at times when immigration spiked.
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff earlier in the Biden administration, said the number of officers needed to pursue those deemed a public safety threat are at direct odds with the goal of deporting people in large numbers.
“You’re not going to be able to do both of those with the resources you have, with the deportation officers you have,” Houser said. “Just the arithmetic, the time-intensive nature of those sort of arrests will overwhelm any ability to get to those large scale numbers.”
Genalo said the officers in charge of individual cases have to get a lead, ensure they have the legal authority to arrest someone and then track the person down. They generally aren’t allowed to enter a residence, so they want to catch people outside.
Source: BBC
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