A new document received by ProPublica under a Freedom of Information Act request demonstrates that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has adopted a policy that conflicts with both President Trump’s executive order (EO) and public Department of Homeland Security (DHS) guidelines on immigration enforcement. I commented for the story, which you can read here.
The bottom line is that the memo shows that for months, ICE has been requiring agents to arrest all unauthorized immigrants whom they “encounter,” regardless of whether they are otherwise priorities for removal. Previously, ICE had admitted that it sometimes arrests non-prioritized immigrants, but this memo goes much further, requiring them to do so in all cases. This directly contradicts President Trump’s statements about targeting criminal aliens, the text of his EO which creates priorities for removal, and Secretary John Kelly’s department-wide DHS memo that requires that agents be able to retain their discretion over arrests and mandates that they follow the department’s removal priorities when arresting people that they “encounter.”
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