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During Trump’s first 100 days in office, ICE increased its arrests of people suspected of being in the country illegally by nearly 40 percent compared to the same time last year. Between January 22 and April 29, more than 41,000 individuals were “administratively” arrested on civil immigration charges, ICE announced last month.
ICE agents apprehended 11,000 fewer people the year before, when the Obama administration was pressing the agency to prioritize the removal of undocumented immigrants with serious criminal convictions. While those standards never fully took hold, Trump has completely erased them from existence.
Under the president’s executive orders, all unauthorized immigrants are targets for removal, including undocumented parents of children born in the United States.
Those relaxed standards have only added to a backlog in federal immigration courts, where nearly 600,000 cases are awaiting decision, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which analyzes and publicizes federal government records obtained through public information requests.
In an email, TRAC co-directors David Burnham and Susan B. Long noted that most of the new cases this fiscal year don’t involve noncitizens who committed crimes.
“For example, in only 1.7 percent of all cases were individuals charged as having committed an aggravated felony, while an additional 4.1 percent were charged with engaging in less serious criminal activity that allegedly made them deportable,” their email reads. “Not a single person so far this year has been charged as being deportable because the individual endorsed or espoused terrorist activity, or were alleged likely to engage in terrorist activities.”
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