President Donald Trump has postponed a massive ICE operation that would have targeted 2,000 families with members who have received deportation orders. The raids were set to begin Sunday, nearly a week after Trump tweeted that “ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”
Saturday, only roughly 12 hours before the predawn raids were set to begin, the president tweeted the operation will not begin for at least two weeks — if it is carried out at all — in order to give Congress time to “get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.” Should he not be satisfied with lawmakers’ progress in that time, Trump wrote, “Deportations start!”
Trump claimed he decided to pause the operation “at the request of Democrats,” and CNN reports a call House speaker Nancy Pelosi made to Trump on Friday may have influenced his thinking on the matter. The president and speaker reportedly spoke for more than 10 minutes, and Pelosi is said to have directly asked the president to hold off on the raids.
In a Saturday statement, the speaker called the raids “heartless” and said they would be a “brutal action which will tear families apart and inject terror into our communities.” After the president announced the postponement Saturday afternoon, Pelosi thanked him on Twitter, calling the delay “welcome,” but seemed to caution that his timeline for an immigration deal might be too tight, writing, “time is needed for comprehensive immigration reform.”
As the Washington Post reported, the raids were to be conducted as part of a “family op” across 10 cities. In his first tweet, Trump called for a far greater number of people to be detained, promising “millions of illegal aliens” would be deported; the ICE action nevertheless would have been incredibly large in scope and not without risk for communities where immigrants live and places where they work.
In an interview with ABC, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Mark Morgan said the raids are about maintaining the “rule of law.” And though a ramped-up enforcement effort had been in the works, Trump’s decision to publicly telegraph a major law enforcement operation was an unusual one for a president to make. Coming as it did the evening before his 2020 reelection kickoff, his announcement appeared to be motivated by politics more than necessity. And as I detailed on Tuesday, ICE was blindsided by his tweet.
The Post reports that law enforcement officials felt comfortable talking to the publication on background about the raids because of Trump’s tweet and expressed concerns both about Trump’s motivations and the raids themselves:
Some within DHS and ICE say the president appears to be using the operation for political purposes as he begins his reelection bid. Law enforcement officials worry that by publicly discussing the plan, Trump has undermined the chances of capturing those on the target list, as it likely pushed migrants with deportation orders underground.
ICE didn’t revealed much about the operational logistics of the forthcoming raids, but here’s some of what we knew about them.
Families targeted for deportation have received final orders of deportation but haven’t necessarily been accused of crimes beyond that
CNN reports that raids would have occurred in 10 large cities that are “immigration court locations” — Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco — and were intended to detain people from up to 2,000 families.
Morgan told reporters earlier this month that ICE would be targeting “individuals who have gone through due process and who have received final orders of deportation.”
Last year, the Trump administration developed an expedited legal process for migrant families, which, according to the Post, fast-tracked “the cases of thousands of families in major cities, obtaining ‘in absentia’ deportation orders for thousands of families that did not show up for their court hearings.”
But just because one or more members of a family have deportation orders doesn’t mean they are the hardened criminals that Trump often portrays them as being. (In a departure from Obama administration policy, Trump hasn’t made distinctions between undocumented immigrants who have criminal records and those that don’t.)
After news of the raids broke, the ACLU and RAICES — or the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services — posted tweets aimed at educating immigrants about their rights if they or someone they know is swept up in one of the raids.
ICE officials planned for the raids be conducted over the course of several days; they would have begun early Sunday morning. As the Wall Street Journal reports, carrying out raids in the early morning is standard as it increases the chances those ICE are looking for will be at home.
ICE agents would have worked from a “target list” that contains the last known addresses of people with deportation orders. Agents also planned to make “collateral arrests,” arrests both of undocumented immigrants they encounter that they weren’t looking for, as well as of people they want to monitor but can’t immediately begin the deportation process for. Those collateral arrests may have included the family members of those with deportation orders, as well as neighbors of people on the target list. Those detained in collateral arrests that weren’t able to be immediately deported would have been fitted with ankle monitors and released.
ICE planned to temporarily house detained families in hotel rooms and family residential detention centers. Parents and children that were not arrested as a unit would have been reunited so that they could be deported as a family.
Should the raid have captured parents slated for deportation who have children who are US citizens, as was likely, CNN reports immediate caregivers (be they parents or other relatives) might have been fitted with ankle monitors and released in order to coordinate care for their children; other detained family members would not have be released. According to the New York Times, ICE agents might have also kept citizen children in hotel rooms with their parents until a relative came to pick them up.
Despite these measures, officials and advocacy groups feared children who have lived in the US for years could return home to find their parents have been taken by ICE agents. Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan reportedly argued for reducing the scope of the upcoming operation in part due to concerns children who are away from home due to summer activities, such as visiting relatives, would have been left without primary caregivers.
Sandra Cordero, director of the immigrant advocacy group Families Belong Together, told the Wall Street Journal, “Past raids have left children alone and afraid in empty homes, praying they won’t be left to care for younger siblings by themselves, with no idea if they’ll see their parents again,” and called the operation “another flagrant disregard for the welfare of children.”
The raid was vehemently opposed by many of the mayors of the cities it was set to be conducted in. Many, like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, told ICE not to expect any support from local police, and all advised undocumented immigrants to know their rights before the raid.
Saturday morning, President Trump reiterated his support for the operation. He again portrayed the immigrants slated for deportation as hardened criminals, tweeting the raid would see the detention of people who have “run from the law and run from the courts” and proclaimed, “When people come into our Country illegally, they will be DEPORTED!”
Despite this, by Saturday afternoon, the president had changed his mind. He now says he hopes the threat of raids will push Congress to act, and that he expects lawmakers to have settled on an immigration solution in two weeks, something the House and the Senate have been unable to do for years.
And even when Congress has made progress on the issue, Trump has destroyed those potential deals a number of times, sometimes after seeming to agree to them. While he has made it somewhat clear what he would like a new deal to address, the president has not yet made it publicly known if there are concessions he isn’t willing to accept — for instance, in the past, he has refused to consider proposals based on their protections for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients or because they sought to expand protections for people with Temporary Protected Status.
For a deal to be successful, Congress will not only have to work in a bipartisan manner while navigating the executive branch’s red lines; it will also have to get Trump to sign on and to remain committed to the proposal.
These raids were controversial even within the Trump administration, in part because they’re risky
The Washington Post reported last month that former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and former ICE Acting Director Ronald Vitiello were ousted from the administration in April in part because they were concerned that raids like the ones ICE is now planning to go forward with would be “bad policy and that the proposal was less than half-baked.”
Indeed, there are indications that the raids would have been somewhat indiscriminate, in part because of intelligence shortcomings. From the Post:
ICE agents have limited intelligence on the locations of the families with court-ordered deportations beyond their last known addresses. But White House and ICE officials believe agents will be able to make many “collateral arrests” by finding foreigners living in the country illegally at or near the target locations.
The publicity Trump has given to the operations will likely cause some undocumented immigrants who have received deportation orders and are living in affected cities to go underground. But ICE believed agents would have been able to arrest others who weren’t necessarily targets that were happened upon during the operation.
Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan has also reportedly pushed back on the large-scale “family op,” advocating a much more limited plan that would target approximately 150 families, per the Post.
It could well be that the president is buying time to gather more intelligence; he could also truly hope the pressure will create a success on immigration that has long eluded him. And both could have factored into the president’s calculus. More will become clear in two weeks’ time, after the president’s deadline for a border and asylum deal.
The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.
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