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One of Trump’s first acts as president was to throw out his predecessor’s priority list. He issued Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” on his sixth day in office. “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States,” the order reads, “if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.” Data once used to focus on prioritized groups could now, in theory, be used against anyone, and individual officers now had a freer hand to pursue their own priorities. The results were predictable: Both the percentage and sheer number of arrests by ICE of people without criminal convictions shot upward. There were 58,010 such arrests during the administration’s first 14 months, according to an analysis by NBC News — nearly three times as many as during the preceding 14 months. Statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, meanwhile, show a significant rise in immigration cases involving long-term residents.
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