Internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) communications show the unshackled agency has served as an unofficial PR machine for Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, with emails detailing efforts to distort the truth by highlighting only the most "egregious cases" of immigrants arrested in order to justify the administration’s racist narrative of “bad hombres” running amok. But for the most part, the agency was having a hard time finding “egregious cases” to exploit because many of the undocumented immigrants they were sweeping up had no criminal record at all:
During the enforcement effort called Operation Cross Check, the agency instructed its field offices to each highlight three “egregious” cases of apprehended immigrants who have serious criminal backgrounds. But in Austin, where ICE agents seized 51 immigrants, agents at first failed to come up with a single “egregious” case, the emails show.
“I have been pinged by HQ this morning indicating that we failed at this tasking,” one local official wrote, according to the emails, which were obtained by Vanderbilt University law students through a records request under the Freedom of Information Act and published by the online publication the Intercept.
The next day, an official wrote in a follow-up email that agents “just picked up a criminal a few minutes ago, so get with him for your first egregious case.”
Of the immigrants arrested in the Austin raid, more than one-half had no criminal record.
As Texas state and federal leaders like Congressman Joaquin Castro and Austin Councilmember Greg Casar began rushing out messages on social media warning the community about arrests and condemning the raids of immigrant families and communities, the emails show ICE agents were stalking their accounts:
“Team, Please be careful.. Austin City councilmember Greg Casar is saying ICE has taken action in the North Lamar/ Rundberg areas arresting people for ‘standing up for our values against people like Abbott and Trump,’” a public information officer emailed in reference to a Facebook post by the council member.
“In their first media responses, ICE officials maintained the line that the raids were in the public interest, telling reporters that ‘by removing from the streets criminal aliens and other threats to the public, ICE helps improve public safety.’” But “while they sought to depict those swept up in the raids as dangerous criminals, it immediately became clear that many had only minor violations on their record, and that dozens had no criminal record at all.”
Subsequent data showed that ICE has arrested thousands of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, with one report in May finding detailing a 156 percent surge in comparison to that same period last year. In a series of recent raids vindictively targeting so-called “sanctuary cities,” one-third of the 500 arrested had no criminal record either. Despite the recent deportations of Oakland nurse Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, Ohio dad Jesus Lara, and brothers Diego and Lizandro Claros Saravia—all immigrants with no criminal record—the administration and ICE continue to insist these raids are a matter of public safety.
“I think what those emails make very clear is that we have a federal law enforcement agency that’s willing to lie, just like Trump is willing to lie, in order to continue the criminalization of immigrant communities,” Councilman Casar said. “We live in a really scary time where a federal law enforcement agency like ICE is essentially operating as a propaganda machine for the Trump administration.”
“They specifically went out of their way to mislead the public by searching for egregious cases,” he continued. “And then you can see in the emails that they couldn’t find egregious cases.”