In the first weeks of the Trump governance the number of non-criminals arrested has increased by one-third, together with the number of immigrant arrests.
The Washington Post informed, that this year, only in 2 months, from January 20 to March 13, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement removal authorities made 21,362 arrests.
This number is lag behind, if compared to the number in a same timeframe of the President Barack Obama administration in 2014. Still the pace and the number of arrests will increase, not allowing any discretion toward undocumented immigrants, as it took place in the last two years of the Obama administration.
The increase of arrests proves again that the Trump administration’s priority of enforcing immigration laws more sharply, compared to previous administration, taking into consideration more than double the number of non-criminals and endowing immigration officials wide authority to go after a huge range of illegal immigrants.
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In the beginning of 2017, these two months only, 21,000 arrested is a roughly 33% increase over the same period in 2016 and a roughly 18% increase over the same while in 2015. Moreover, 5,441 non-criminal illegal immigrants arrested doubled the number in either 2015 or 2016. In the first two quarters of 2014 there was registered approximately the same percentage of non-criminal arrests as this year, comprising of 29,238 arrests, 7,483 of them non-criminal.
During the first six years of administration, Obama was accused by liberals, as they considered the deportation of undocumented immigrants was too aggressive, meanwhile Obama was enforcing new immigration laws which he pursued together with lawmakers a complex immigration reform deal in Congress. Under the pressure of talks about immigration reform when it became obvious the reform would not pass Congress in 2014, Obama started to take more executive decisions to concentrate his administration on undocumented immigrants, which considered to be the greatest threat to communities and show more tolerance to those who were not.
A new set of priorities was published in the end of 2014 by the Department of Homeland Security, paying more attention to those undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes.
One of Trump’s first actions as executive was to change those priorities to a new complex that could include every undocumented immigrant in the US. DHS reported, that no one in the US illegally will be exempt from deportation.
Despite of what Kelly says about deportation, assuring “illegally does not necessarily get you targeted, it’s got to be something else”, individuals encountered in the process of scheduled arrests of people prioritized for detention can also be arrested and subject to deportation. Adversaries of Trump’s aggressive immigration laws are thrilled that his politics has influenced tense situation in immigrant communities, where many of them have US citizen family members and have lived peacefully in the US for years.
