Trump wants mass deportations. A ride-along with immigration officers shows some of the challenges

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Posted on 12/28/2024 2:42:46 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

NEW YORK — The immigration officers sat in their vehicles before dawn near a two-story building. A New York subway line rumbled overhead. After about two hours, an officer’s voice crackled over the radio.

“I think that’s Tango,” he said, using a term for a target. “Gray hoodie. Backpack. Walking quickly.”

The officers surrounded and handcuffed a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor.

Kenneth Genalo, head of Enforcement and Removal Operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York, said a popular misconception is that officers can sweep into a community and pick up a wide swath of people who are in the United States illegally and send them to their home countries.

“It’s called targeted enforcement,” Genalo said. “We don’t grab people and then take them to JFK and put them on a plane.”

With Donald Trump returning to the White House, there is intense interest in how the Republican will carry out his immigration agenda, including a campaign pledge of mass deportations. His priorities could run into the realities faced by agents focused on enforcement and removals, including the unit in New York that offered the Associated Press a glimpse into its operations: The number of people on its lists to target already eclipses the number of officers available to do the work.

The Biden administration had narrowed deportation priorities to those who present public safety threats or recently crossed the border. Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, says officials in the new administration also will prioritize those who pose a risk, such as criminals, before moving on to immigrants whom courts have ordered removed from the U.S.

But Homan also has signaled that enforcement could be wider: “If you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem,” he said recently...

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