NEW: ICE confirms a BuzzFeed News report that the agency was implementing a policy that allows officers to quickly deport immigrants who can’t prove they’ve been in the US for a certain period of time.
These deportations generally happen WITHOUT immigration judge oversight.
Immigrants have to use documents to prove the period of time they’ve been in the US.
Attorneys worry that this policy will expose those who can’t prove the length of their stay in the US.
The ICE statement leaves out many details from the agency training materials and the internal memo.
ICE officers have been told they must not apply the quick deportations to people who can prove they were in the US before the policy was first issued last July.
How is this policy going to be used?
The acting director said that it would likely be used in ICE operations targeting “criminal aliens” and in worksite raids, per his memo to officers:
To be clear: this policy targets undocumented immigrants, though advocates are worried it could expose other immigrants as well.
Something to consider with fast-track deportations:
ICE has previously wrongly arrested and detained US citizens, including those who are picked up from a county jail:
NEW: Two controversial border programs were rife with issues, including families forced to remain in custody longer than appropriate, girls stuck in the same detention space w/ unrelated men, & toilets that had limited privacy, per leaked draft IG report.
“We found that CBP held many families together in large open cells in the El Paso [Central Processing Center] with no assurance of privacy or separation of juveniles from unrelated adults,” the report states. In one cell, two 14-year-old girls were held with nine unrelated men.
“Toilet stalls in the living area with waist-high partitions offered little privacy” and there was no “private space for nursing” despite there being mothers with infants.
NEW: ICE officials have started to implement a policy that allows officers to arrest and rapidly deport undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for less than two years, according to internal emails and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The shift could allow the Trump administration to increase deportations while circumventing a court system that is severely backed up and short on resources, but advocates for immigrants have said it would destroy their due-process rights.
We got the internal emails and guidance memos on this policy, just issued late last week.
What we found:
ICE officers cannot revisit cases of immigrants who are already in deportation proceedings & cannot quickly deport people who can prove they were in the US before July 23.
Acting DHS Sec. Wolf echoing comments we've heard since 2018 --- that ICE will be forced to do more at-large arrests due to "sanctuary policies" that limit jail cooperation with immigration enforcement. He says that as a result of this collateral arrests will increase.
Wolf highlighting a few of the arrests individuals with more serious criminal records --- unclear the full breakdown of this operation and each individual's past.
Wolf slams sanctuary policies and tells these communities to do their "job" --- notable that local law enforcement has said that these policies help them in their local criminal investigations because of the trust it creates in immigrant communities.
NEW: ICE arrested more than 100 immigrants across California in an operation last week, the latest effort by the agency to target the state, according to a source w/ knowledge of this operation.
The details of the operation, which occurred last week in Northern and Southern California and were described to BuzzFeed News by a source with knowledge of it, are expected to be released in a news conference on Wednesday in Washington, DC.
ICE’s acting leader, Tony Pham, and Chad Wolf, the acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, plan to slam local officials for so-called “sanctuary” policies.
NEW: DHS officials acknowledged that transfers of detainees between facilities holding immigrants for ICE had “contributed to outbreaks” of COVID-19 & that poor information sharing made tracking the virus more difficult, according to a report I obtained.
The move is the latest salvo in the wars over so-called “sanctuary cities.”
The administration has released “reports” on counties with sanctuary policies and has tried, often unsuccessfully, to sue them and strip them of federal funds.
This latest effort, however, was viewed by some as inappropriately politically motivated: 1 month before the election the agency paid for the billboards in a crucial state, and one where President Trump was down 9 percent among likely voters in a recent Washington Post-ABC poll.