Trump boasts "millions" to be deported next week

SCREEN CAPTURE / NBC

Immigration policy is one of the AA communities' top issues.I

A tweet from Donald Trump Monday (June 17) is raising concern among immigration advocates and spreading uncertainty among undocumented immigrants or those already detained awaiting a deportation hearing.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump tweeted, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “They will be removed as fast as they come in,” he said. He did not offer specifics.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it would challenge the Trump administration's directives.

“These memos confirm that the Trump administration is willing to trample on due process, human decency, the well-being of our communities, and even protections for vulnerable children, in pursuit of a hyper-aggressive mass deportation policy,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

There are an estimated 12 million immigrants who are in the country without the proper paperwork, mainly from Mexico and Central America. About 1.5 million undocumented immigrants come from Asian countries, predominantly from India, China and the Philippines.

Unlike the undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, most of whom enter the US by illegally crossing the border, most Asian undocumented immigrants arrive with legal visas but simply overstay beyond the visa expiration date. Overstaying a visa is a civil, not a criminal, offense. Those in this category man not specifically be included in the priority list but, under the memos, they still are more likely to face deportation than they had been before given the penchant for immigration authorities to go after low hanging fruit.

An administration official says the effort will focus on people who have been issued final deportation orders by federal judges but remain at large in the country.

However, it is not clear if Homeland Security was prepared for Trump's tweet.

U.S. officials with knowledge of the preparations have said in recent days that the operation was not imminent, and ICE officials said late Monday night that they were not aware that the president planned to divulge their enforcement plans on Twitter.

Executing a large-scale operation of the type under discussion requires hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of U.S. agents and supporting law enforcement personnel, as well as weeks of intelligence gathering and planning to verify addresses and locations of individuals targeted for arrest.

Trump's claim that ICE would be deporting “millions” also was at odds with the reality of the agency’s staffing and budgetary challenges. At present, there are only room for 34,000 at the numerous existing detention facilities.

Supporters of the plan have argued forcefully that a dramatic and highly publicized operation of this type will send a message to families that are in defiance of deportation orders and could act as a deterrent.

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