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Who are the people locked up in America's immigration jails? Ask President Donald Trump or his sycophants on Fox News and you'll hear horror stories: machete-wielding gang members, thugs, unrepentant rapists, and all sorts of hardened criminals. The invented invasion of these so-called bad hombres has been used to justify a wish list of callous immigration policies, including separating families and blocking people from applying for asylum.
The truth, of course, is far more depressing. A solid 64 percent of the roughly 49,000 immigrants in federal custody as of the last day of April had no criminal history, according to the latest snapshot of immigrants being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The data, obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, signals the continuance of a worrying trend under Trump: ICE is no longer prioritizing the detention of immigrants with prior convictions or immigrants who might pose a threat to society.
South Florida ICE jails are no exception. More than 85 percent of the 677 detainees at the Broward Transitional Center had no criminal history, according to TRAC. The same was true of 52 percent of the nearly 700 immigrants held at Southwest Miami-Dade's Krome Service Processing Center.
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