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The rhetoric is like a broken record, and it’s tired: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is “doing a fantastic job of keeping us safe by eradicating the worst criminal elements. So brave,” Donald Trump tweeted in June. “I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13,” he claimed another time. But back here in reality, the ICE arrests of immigrants with no criminal record at all has surged.
“ICE arrests of noncriminals increased 66 percent in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year over the same period a year earlier. Arrests of convicts, meantime, rose nearly 2 percent,” the AP reports. “More noncriminals have also been deported. Among those expelled from the U.S. interior in fiscal 2017, there was a 174 percent increase from the previous year of those with no criminal convictions. Deportations of those with convictions rose nearly 13 percent over the same period.”
Among the immigrants swept up by ICE include Ruben Moroyoqui, who overstayed his visa nearly two decades ago and is now dad to four U.S. citizen kids. Moroyoqui was pulled over in Arizona for no other reason than apparently driving while brown. “First, the officer asked for his license. His second question, Moroyoqui said, was ‘Are you here legally?’ He wasn’t cited for any driving violation; he was simply handed over to ICE, which began proceedings to deport him to Mexico. An appeal is pending.”
The administration’s end goal here is clear. It’s not about making America safer—remember, Trump threw out ICE’s enforcement priorities after taking office—it’s about fulfilling a white supremacist agenda and padding up the agency’s numbers at the expense of hardworking moms and dads and immigrant families across the nation. Meanwhile, actual bad hombres continue to go unchecked as Trump and complicit legislators in Congress look away.