DAILY TRIFECTA: Mass Deportation On The Rocks
Vanilla ICE
THE SET-UP: The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) held its annual meeting last week. The mood was downright triumphant as a parade of Trump Administration denizens ran victory laps around the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at the National Harbor in Maryland.
The big story of the week was Elon Musk’s “Democracy Chainsaw Massacre.” The other notable story was ultra-Christian conservative CPAC founder Matt Schlapp being accused of groping men at a bar … again. But who’s counting?
The week’s one takeaway was Musk overshadowing the convention’s keynote speaker … President Donald J. Trump. But he, too, took his share of victory laps. Among his many claims and “exaggerations,” this assertion stood out:
Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a very moderate man, but he was very strong in that.
One problem is that it isn’t the largest in history … at least, not yet.
And it isn’t even close.
Quite to the contrary, it’s starting to look like it’s turning into a bit of a messaging problem. The White House was banking on COPS-style TV gold … with viral video of agents rounding up Congolese murders and swarthy former insane asylum dwellers by the dozens. It was supposed to start “on Day One!” Within minutes of Trump taking the oath, in fact. But now it’s one month later and the reality show hasn’t quite panned out. And that’s led to some finger-pointing and paranoia about leaks.
Of course, Trump’s promise to ship out “all the illegals” was, at best, fanciful. But his devotees—like those in the audience at CPAC—believed him and, as it happens, they expect him to make it so. And while he did follow through with a punitive revocation of special temporary status for the hardworking, religiously devout Haitians of Springfield, Ohio … his White House is looking for ways to make reality match his campaign’s fantasy.
As I write this, there is an ongoing raid in a Houston-area locale called “Colony Ridge,” a place that’s reportedly been a favorite of Right-Wing conspiracy mongers. It could be a couple days before we know what they found and how many were detained and deported. But even if this raid ends up being significant, I searched for “ICE RAID” stories over the last week and below you will see what I came up with. What I did find … was a number of stories detailing the fear and anxiety being stoked by the possibility of raids … and how that fear is impacting small businesses around the country. People are afraid to work and afraid to shop or go out to eat … and, given the other pressures the Trump Administration is applying to the economy, the one law that may ultimately be enforced “at levels nobody has ever seen” is the law of unintended consequences. - jp
TITLE: Trump officials launch ICE effort to deport unaccompanied migrant children
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-directs-ice-agents-find-deport-unaccompanied-migrant-2025-02-23/
EXCERPTS: The Trump administration is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president's mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. It lays out four phases of implementation, beginning with a planning phase on January 27, though it did not provide a start date for enforcement operations.
More than 600,000 immigrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian since 2019, according to government data, as the number of migrants caught crossing illegally reached record levels.
Unaccompanied children began arriving in large numbers a decade ago due to violence and economic instability in their home countries - and U.S. immigration policies that enabled them to enter and often remain.
The majority are from Central America and Mexico. Some migrated to join parents already in the United States; many traveled with family members or smugglers.
Trump's border czar Tom Homan has repeatedly claimed that some 300,000 unaccompanied children went missing during Biden's presidency and were at risk of trafficking and exploitation. Beyond initial follow-up calls, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was not obligated to track the whereabouts of the children after they left custody. Many are now adults or living with their parents.
Individual ICE field offices will determine “how to best locate, make contact, and serve immigration documents as appropriate for individual targets, when conducting enforcement actions,” involving unaccompanied children, the memo said.
Because the children often live in households with adults without authorization to be in the United States, their addresses could also help ICE boost its overall arrest numbers.
TITLE: Immigration raids make good TV, but are arrests really up?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/22/media-blitz-ice-stops-reporting-migrant-arrests/79320393007/
EXCERPTS: Standing in front of an Aurora, Colorado, apartment complex on Feb. 5, then-ICE acting director Caleb Vitello spoke to the camera from the parking lot.
"We're here today to conduct an at-large enforcement operation looking for Tren de Aragua members," he said in a video posted on social media.
Another post confirmed that ICE and other federal agencies were targeting "100-plus" members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, at the Aurora complex. Dozens of media organizations reported the news.
But after the cameras had left, ICE refused to say what it had accomplished. The agency didn't respond to requests for information about the raid. On Feb. 7, ABC reported that feds arrested one suspected gang member and detained 29 other people.
On Friday, in the latest sign the White House isn't happy with the direction, Vitello was removed from his post.
Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, defended the agency's decision to broadcast raids in a CBS News interview in late January.
“It’s not a spectacle,” she told CBS. “This is our nation’s law enforcement, judicial process. The scales of justice are equally applied to everybody. We want transparency on this.”
But ICE hasn't published a roster of who is being arrested, what crimes they are accused of, or whether they will face prosecution, detention or deportation.
Trump has repeatedly promised to remove millions of immigrants in the country illegally, first targeting those with criminal records. To remove even 1 million immigrants a year, ICE would have to arrest and deport an average of 2,700 people a day.
In its first month, according to data provided to Reuters, the Trump administration deported 37,660 migrants, compared with a monthly average of 57,000 deportations during the last year of the Biden administration. Trump officials explained to Reuters that the Biden administration focused on deporting recent border crossers, who can be removed more quickly.
Illegal border crossings have dropped dramatically from a year ago. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer than 82,000 migrant encounters in January versus more than 242,000 encounters during the same month a year ago.
If the Trump administration is arresting significantly more people, it isn't reflected in the publicly reported detention numbers. The average daily population in ICE detention rose to 41,600 in February – ICE's current capacity – from 39,000 in December.
About 18,500 people, or 44%, of those in ICE custody in mid-February had a criminal conviction or pending charges. More than half of those in custody had no criminal record.
Publicizing immigration enforcement could benefit the agency and the president's goals, said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration.
But prime-time raids in big cities pull agents away from more serious investigations, he said.
“All I see is a condensing of national ICE enforcement removal work into one metropolitan area," Houser said, "and then spinning it up in the media and showing a lot of battle-rattle and bluster."
TITLE: Despite rumors of a massive immigration sweep in Los Angeles, numbers don’t add up
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-23/ice-raids-los-angeles
EXCERPTS: For days, rumors that the federal government was planning a massive immigration enforcement sweep in Los Angeles County on Sunday had put officials on alert and cast a pall of fear and unease across many immigrant communities.
But by midafternoon, it appeared that the operation — if indeed one had been launched — had not been anywhere nearly as widespread as many had predicted.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials would not say whether any special operations had taken place or release arrest figures for the day. Representatives for the FBI, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles Police Department either referred questions to ICE, had no information or said they were not involved in federal immigration actions.
Officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles — a lockup run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons — had been asked to prepare for an influx of up to 120 new bookings from expected immigration raids this weekend, according to two sources familiar with the situation. Typically, the downtown facility is staffed to receive new inmates only on weekdays, the officials said, and handling weekend intakes required ordering staff to come in on their days off.
The staff came in as directed, but by midafternoon immigration officials had dropped off fewer than a dozen people for processing, according to one of the sources.
“We are hearing they aren’t getting the numbers they want,” the source said late Sunday afternoon, adding that the numbers could rise if officials started bringing in detainees from San Bernardino County later in the evening. By the end of day, the source said, immigration officials dropped off a total of 12 people. Both sources requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
When reached by email for comment, a federal prison spokesman confirmed that the agency is assisting ICE by housing some detainees, but declined to comment on any plans to house migrants in the Los Angeles detention center. He said the agency would not comment “on the legal status of an individual, nor do we specify the legal status of individuals assigned to any particular facility, including numbers and locations.”
SEE ALSO:
TITLE: Two Immigrant Workers Arrested in ICE Raid at Greek-American Restaurant in Minnesota
https://greekcitytimes.com/2025/02/24/two-immigrant-workers-arrested-in-ice-raid-at-greek-american-restaurant-in-minnesota/
EXCERPT: According to CBS, the incident occurred in Rochester, MN, in the parking lot of one of two Greek Mediterranean restaurants named Nupa, owned by businessman Ted Paizis. He reported that ICE officers detained the two cooks Wednesday morning as they arrived for their kitchen shifts.
“When you lose two employees, the whole operation is affected. They were like family to us, and we’ll miss them. It’s sad that it happened this way,” Paizis told CBS.
Due to the staff shortage, he was forced to limit operations to just one of his restaurant locations. Paizis stated he was unaware of any issues with the workers’ residency or work status, speculating that the problem might involve the authenticity of their documents but stressing they were tax-paying employees who contributed to U.S. healthcare and tax systems.
“They worked, paid taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. As far as we know, they had no criminal record,” Paizis said.
TITLE: ICE charges South Texas bakery owners with hiring undocumented workers
https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/south-texas/article/south-texas-abby-s-bakery-undocumented-workers-20181294.php
EXCERPTS: According to the Texas Tribune, Homeland Security Investigations received a tip about Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos, which led to a "worksite enforcement action" by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on February 12.
ICE reported finding eight undocumented individuals, who were also allegedly living next door to the bakery. Based on court testimony, the Tribune reported that six of the individuals were in the U.S. on temporary visas, though it was unclear whether they had overstayed them. The immigrants were subsequently returned to Mexico, according to the report.
Leonardo Baez and Nora Alicia Avila-Guel admitted they knew the workers were undocumented and were each granted a bond of $100,000 with a $15,000 cash deposit, the Tribune reported.
A family member told the Tribune that the couple are in the U.S. legally and immigrated from Mexico to South Texas over 20 years ago.
TITLE: ICE conducts ‘worksite enforcement’ at Suehay Tortilleria in McAllen
https://myrgv.com/local-news/2025/02/21/ice-conducts-worksite-enforcement-at-suehay-tortilleria-in-mcallen/
EXCERPT: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed it conducted “worksite enforcement” at Suehay Tortilleria in McAllen on Friday.
It’s not immediately clear whether anyone was detained or arrested. ICE only issued a statement that did not include information about whether anyone was taken into custody.
That statement only said that ICE conducted worksite enforcement at Suehay Tortilleria “in response to information or allegations received by ICE Homeland Security Investigations.”
The agency said that any allegation received is taken seriously and could result in an investigation.
TITLE: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raid lumber mill
https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/news/woodworking-industry-news/immigrations-and-customs-enforcement-raid-lumber-mill
EXCERPT: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement conducted a raid Feb. 18 at a New York state lumber mill and detained nine employees.
In a statement to North Country Public Radio, the parent company of Tupper Lake Pine Mill, The Matra Group, said that the employees were authorized to work in the U.S. "We can confirm that the Tupper Lake Pine Mill, owned by the Matra Group, was subject to an ICE raid this past Tuesday,” Nicholas Drouin, Matra co-president and director of manufacturing operations, said in a statement to NCPR.