Trump sows fear among migrants with shock-and-awe deportation campaign
Summary
Officials are calling attention to raids and pursuing deportations beyond immigrant hubs.
President Trump’s immigration directives are clearing the path for officials to step up deportations. But the White House’s flashy public-relations campaign around its deportation work might be just as effective, as it unsettles immigrant communities across the country.
Trump is marshaling federal powers from the Pentagon to the Drug Enforcement Administration to make a crackdown at the border and aggressive interior enforcement the first priority for his second term.
In the first week of his administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 5,000 migrants in the U.S., agency data show. ICE arrested approximately 310 people a day during former President Joe Biden’s last year in office.
Newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, wearing raid attire and an ICE vest, recorded a video on Tuesday with agents making arrests in New York City.
“We’re getting the dirt bags off these streets," she said.
The administration has said it is targeting people with criminal backgrounds, but hundreds of migrants in the U.S. illegally who didn’t have a criminal record have been arrested, ICE data show.
“People are keeping their kids home from school," said Gale Brewer, a New York city council member representing Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “They’re afraid to go to work. They’re just scared in general."
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said moves such as a raid in Newark on Jan. 23 that drew national attention to three arrests, were designed to send a message.
“It’s about creating the sense of awe, the sense of fear, to send a message," he said. “Every administration has enforcement action; the aim of this administration is more to publicize it."
A construction worker who arrived illegally from Guatemala six years ago in North Texas, where immigration agents apprehended some 80 people over the weekend, said he was staying home—except to go to work. He is shopping for groceries in a neighborhood where few immigrants live to avoid getting into a crowd with other Latinos.
The White House has distributed images of handcuffed immigrants being led onto a military airplane and mug shots of arrested migrants with criminal records, including those with ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Phil McGraw, who made his fame as a television host, accompanied agents on a televised raid in Chicago.
“You’re Dr. Phil?" a man being arrested there responded when McGraw tried to ask about his legal status.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt listed arrests and criminal backgrounds of some recently arrested migrants at her first briefing on Tuesday.
“By using every lever of his federal power, President Trump has sent a loud and clear message to the entire world, ‘America will no longer tolerate illegal immigration,’" she said.
Trump has revoked a directive that kept ICE from targeting schools and churches and granted immigration-enforcement authority to agencies at the Justice Department, including the DEA and U.S. Marshals Service. He has allowed officials to strip some migrants of legal status who thought they had entered the country legally under Biden administration programs.
Senior ICE officials have told subordinates that the agency’s offices are each responsible for 75 arrests a day, or roughly 1,000-1,500 a day across the country, two people familiar with the discussions said.
Some of the arrests have taken place far beyond immigrant hubs in places including Honolulu and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
“This is all brand new," said Gary Singh, an immigration lawyer in Honolulu representing two recently arrested clients.
ICE is pursuing immigrants on lists of criminals the agency created before Trump took office. Officials have said that other deportable immigrants found during ICE operations would be arrested, too.
“Some of these people probably, maybe would have been arrested under Biden but you wouldn’t have this magnitude of arrests," said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports immigration restrictions. “The publicity part of it is probably intentional and healthy."
Write to Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com, Elizabeth Findell at elizabeth.findell@wsj.com and Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com
