Ice Cheif Tom Homan speaks at the announcement of the new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office at a news conference in Washington, April 26, 2017. (AP/Susan Walsh)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan declared on Tuesday that the federal government “shouldn’t wait” for undocumented immigrants to commit a crime before they are detained, comments that were characterized by one immigrant rights activist as part of the “reign of terror” President Donald Trump has unleashed in immigrant communities.
Homan added that undocumented residents in the U.S. “should be uncomfortable” and “looking over their shoulder[s],” concluding that “no population of persons” in the country illegally is safe from deportation.
“You should look over your shoulder,” he said, “and you need to be worried.”
The remarks came during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, in which Homan asked for more than a billion dollars to expand ICE’s capacity to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. Immigration arrests are “already up sharply since President Trump took office,” the Washington Post noted, and they “could rise dramatically next year” if Homan’s requests are fulfilled.
More evidence the administration is methodically building a deportation force to remove 11m people. https://t.co/6wl4XfMJJk
— Ali Noorani (@anoorani) June 13, 2017
Shorter ICE: "We are evil." https://t.co/9qKuX78ibF
— Jonathan Cohn (@JonathanCohn) June 14, 2017
melt ICE 2k17 https://t.co/wmgHYFnt5r
— JOIN LABOUR (@See_Em_Play) June 14, 2017
Morally revolting. Also, this is another broken Trump campaign promise. What happened to just the "bad hombres?" https://t.co/5iM3GqM68B
— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) June 14, 2017
“Part of that increase,” added Buzzfeed‘s Salvador Hernandez, “is due…to what many have seen as a shift in the agency to not just focus on immigrants with violent criminal histories, but minor crimes as well. Attorneys have also pointed to undocumented immigrants who have been detained without any criminal history, or minor convictions.”
Last week, Reuters reported that not only is the Trump administration rounding up undocumented immigrants at a staggering clip, it is also “reopen[ing] the cases of hundreds of illegal immigrants who…had been given a reprieve from deportation” by the Obama administration.
“Before, if someone did something after the case was closed out that showed that person was a threat, then it would be reopened,” said David Leopold, an attorney and immigrant rights activist. “Now they are opening cases just because they want to deport people.”
Following Homan’s comments on Tuesday, Leopold wrote, “That’s the way they roll,” referring to ICE, whose agents have felt increasingly empowered since Trump entered office in January.
.@ICEgov Dir confirms that the deportation targets ARE moms, dads & grandmas "We shouldn't wait for them to become a criminal" he said.
— David Leopold (@DavidLeopold) June 13, 2017
They've been rounding up Kurds in Tenn. some with convictions from over 10 years ago. Also harassing cmty & intrusive question.
— Remziya (@Remziya) June 13, 2017
That's the way they roll. Parents, grandparents, dreamers, ppl w/decades old convictions. A reign of terror in immigrant communities.
— David Leopold (@DavidLeopold) June 13, 2017
And they're rounding up Iraqi Chaldeans in Michigan. Terrible about the Kurds.
— David Leopold (@DavidLeopold) June 13, 2017
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