Trump: The New Deportation Threat

Julia Preston, The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2017 - "Trump’s demonization of immigrants is driving a widening crackdown. ICE is moving much faster and more aggressively than it did during the Obama years. Agents who chafed under Obama now feel unchained. In California, ICE actions at courthouses prompted the state’s chief justice, Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, to demand in a letter on March 16 that agents stop “stalking undocumented immigrants in our courthouses to make arrests.” Secretary Kelly responded that the courthouse arrests would continue. Reports described many immigrants being detained while dropping off their children at school. In Fort Worth, Texas, ICE agents arrested twenty-six immigrants who turned up for a work detail at the county sheriff’s office, complying with sentences for low-level offenses.

The effects of the push for deportations have been far-reaching. In many cities and towns, immigrants say they feel besieged and are retreating from public life. In their communities, shopping has ebbed and church attendance has dropped. Legal clinics are packed. Mexicans have crowded into their consulates to update passports for themselves and their Mexican-born children, so that they will not be separated in the event they have to leave the United States in a hurry. Israel Rocha, the chief executive of the New York City hospital in Elmhurst, Queens, said immigrants were staying away from its facilities. “People leave their loved ones in the emergency room and run away,” he said at a public meeting in the hospital."