Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) made a record high number of arrests on Tuesday, detaining more than 2,200 people as Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy continues.
NBC News reported that the figure represents the most people ever arrested by Ice in a single day.
Hundreds of the people arrested were enrolled in Ice’s alternative to detention program, under which migrants who are awaiting legal status are given background checks to determine they are not a safety risk, then tracked by the government using ankle monitors or smartphone apps.
The record total comes after senior officials over the weekend instructed rank-and-file Ice officers to arrest more people, even without warrants. In May, the White House demanded that Ice arrest 3,000 people a day.
Some of the arrests “appear to be the result of a new Ice tactic”, NBC News reported, in which Ice officials arrest migrants who are enrolled in the alternative to detention program when they arrive at pre-scheduled check-in meetings at Ice offices.
“[With] mass arresting of people on alternatives to detention or at their Ice check-ins or at immigration court hearings, the dragnet is so wide that there’s no possible valid argument that could be made that these individuals are all dangerous,” Atenas Burrola Estrada, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told NBC News.
The Guardian reported that on Saturday senior Ice officials urged officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement, including by arresting undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others.
In a meeting on 21 May, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, ordered Ice leaders to dramatically increase the number of arrests. Miller and Noem told Ice officials to arrest 3,000 people a day – more than a million a year.
The scramble to arrest as many people as possible has caused chaos, as citizens have been wrongfully detained and detention centers have become overcrowded.
Last week, a fourth grader was detained by Ice officials and separated from his father during a scheduled immigration hearing in Houston, Texas.
KTLA5 reported that Martir Garcia Lara, a student at Torrance elementary in south California, attended the hearing with his father on 29 May.
His teachers alerted the school’s parent-teacher association (PTA), which is lobbying for Lara to be released.
“He’s alone and he’s not able to return home,” said Jasmin King, the president of the PTA.
“We have not received any information on why they were detained. All we know is that Martir is just a fourth grader who’s by himself, without his dad, without a parent, and just in a place that he probably doesn’t know, so we can only imagine what he might be feeling.”
