As reported earlier, one of the immediate consequences of the Trump immigration executive order – and one which has so far gone largely unchallenged – has been a crackdown against illegal immigrants residing in the US. This promptly led Mexico’s Foreign Ministry to say on Thursday it has intensified efforts to protect Mexican migrants, “foreseeing the hardening of measures by immigration authorities in the U.S., as well as possible constitutional violations during raids or in due process.”
According to the WSJ, influential Mexicans are pushing “an aggressive and perhaps risky strategy to fight a likely increase in deportations of their undocumented compatriots in the U.S.: jam U.S. immigration courts in hopes of causing the already overburdened system to break down.” The proposal calls for ad campaigns advising migrants in the U.S. to take their cases to court and fight deportation if detained. “The backlog in the immigration system is tremendous,” said former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. The idea is to double or triple the backlog, “until [U.S. President Donald] Trump desists in this stupid idea,” he added.
For now, however, these efforts to, well, trump Trump’s anti-illegal alien directive have failed to generate traction, and according to Reuters, federal immigration agents arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least four states this week in what officials on Friday called routine “enforcement actions.” The enforcement actions took place in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and surrounding areas, said David Marin, director of enforcement and removal for the Los Angeles field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Marin called the five-day operation an “enforcement surge.”
While the agency did not release a total number of detainees, the Atlanta office alone, which covers three states, arrested 200 people, Bryan Cox, a spokesman for the office, said. An additional 161 arrests were made in the Los Angeles area in a region that included seven highly populated counties, Marin also said that of the people arrested in Southern California, only 10 did not have criminal records, and of those, five had prior deportation orders.
“The rash of these recent reports about ICE checkpoints and random sweeps, that’s all false and that’s dangerous and irresponsible,” Marin said. “Reports like that create a panic.” He described the arrests as largely routine.
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