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While I have no first hand experience of ICEs operations, I am skeptical.
First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented. Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.
Then, I have to say I am somewhat confused. I would assume that ICE would enforce deportation warrants nationwide. So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?
In your opinion, when Vance announced that ICE would go 'door to door', what he meant was that they would politely ask around the neighborhood if anyone had seen a person on their wanted poster?
I mean, technically it is possible that Noem told her department:
Would this be in character for the Trump administration? Fuck no. Trump bombs whom he wants to bomb, invades whom he wants to invade. His administration lies boldly and blatantly, he wields the justice department as his personal cudgel to bash his enemies with while pardoning his allies (or people willing to pay him). He bombs shipwrecked sailors. How many Venezuelans died in his kidnapping operation, again? Who cares, nobody gives a shit about brown foreigners. What is holding him back from invading Greenland are not moral considerations, but merely strategic ones. When ICE shot Good, Noem wasted no time to transparently slander her as a domestic terrorist.
Last year he hired on a lot of new ICE agents, paying good money for a job with rather few requirements. Of course the MAGA militia cosplayers joined in droves, finally a salary and a badge for doing what they wanted to do for a decade. Do you think these will have procedural doubts about rounding up all the day laborers looking for work at Home Depot? "If it turns out one of them is a citizen, we just let him go, no big deal." To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.
Trump is aware that he was elected on a platform to deport illegals, and he is very willing to deliver on that. The people who care about snowflake topics like due process are not his voters. And these will cry Nazi no matter what he does, so there is point to playing nice for him. Most administrations would be embarrassed if the SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against them after they claimed that there was nothing to do about someone they had sadly deported to some foreign megaprison without due process "due to an administrative error". But most administrations also have voters who care about such things.
Of course, this extrapolation from my Gestalt impression (which is based significantly on what Trump actually says and does, not what the 'lying mainstream media' reports, btw) does not have to correspond to the truth, exactly. Perhaps Trump's ICE is keeping precisely in the same procedural bounds as Biden's ICE.
Still, in the fog of war, where any and all statements could be lies (perhaps all of the reports of Native Americans getting arrested as illegals are fake news, perhaps Noem had secret proofs that Good was planning a bomb attack, perhaps the Ayatollah has decided that the best way to deal with the protesters is to embrace human rights and due process), extrapolation of character is a useful heuristic (so Noem was likely talking out of her backside, the Mullah regime is likely cracking down on protests without any giving a damn about human rights, ICE is occasionally arresting a Native American for matching their target racial group, and the left might invent another of such incidents for anyone which happens).
This is one of those cases where euphemisms are confusing the issue. Minnesota is far from the southern border.
Most of these cases are going to be things like visa overstays, green card holders / visa holders who had their status pulled because of a conviction, asylum claimants who lost their case but never left. People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.
Obama and Biden had programs called "administrative closure" or "parole" where the deportation case was closed without actually granting them real legal status or deporting them.
There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.
This sounds like the streetlight effect to me. The words "we deported X illegals" might sound good to Trump's electorate, but realistically they wanted him to start deporting the illegals "dat took deir jerbs", not random-ass schoolteachers that lost their green card over speeding 20 years ago. This will run out of this kind of low-hanging fruit quickly anyway.
Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites. And you can do this only by raiding the place and detaining every worker until they or their employer can prove their legal status.
This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
If a business is found to be hiring illegal immigrants, they are fined.
Sure. There are some dodgy businesses who hire undocumented cousins from India. But these businesses are tiny, and the problem is also tiny.
I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.
I'm pretty sure you need to prove you're not an illegal immigrant to study or get a driver's licence here. Why is this not the solution for the States? It puts the pressure on businesses and is totally politically palatable.
Suppose there is a Hotel X in Australia, and instead of hiring cleaning workers directly, they outsource to another company -- Dodgy Cleaning Services, Inc. Who is responsible for immigration compliance - the hotel or the cleaning service or both?
Or better yet, suppose an Australian family hires a contractor to make some improvements to their house. Who is responsible for immigration compliance? The homeowner or the contractor?
The contractor. This isn't a hard question.
I don't think it's as simple a question as one might think. For example, in the United States there is a lot of precedent that with respect to some types of laws, the hotel is potentially responsible for compliance.
Anyway, assuming that compliance responsibility falls solely on the contractor, this seems like a straightforward workaround for immigration compliance. Instead of directly hiring illegals, use a dodgy contractor. If the dodgy contractor gets fined, they just close up shop and re-open under a new name somewhere else.
Combine this with the fact that the American economy is to a large extent dependent on the labor of illegal aliens, and it's easy to see how we can get into a situation where people get away breaking the rules.
To an extent I am speculating, but I am pretty sure that in the United States, things like going out to eat at a restaurant; hiring a crew to do yard work; or going on a week's vacation in Las Vegas would be very noticeably more expensive but for this kind of cheating.
You are just assuming things will happen in such a way as to make this whole thing complicated. Which, to be fair, it has happened in that way until basically now. But it doesn't have to. Like there is a workaround in your telling of events because the government creates one, which it doesn't have to. If you assume the government actually wants to accomplish its stated goals then this isn't really a conundrum. Just send the dodgy contractor to prison. Its not that hard.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not necessarily easy. If you look at Dodgy Contractor, Inc.'s personnel files, I assure you that there will be some evidence that they made an effort to comply with the requirements. Ok, so if you go back and look at their photocopy of Jose's green card, it might become apparent that he actually used the green card of Jose's second cousin Juan. The nominal head of Dodgy Contractor, Inc. will tell the authorities that he relied on Maria to review the papers, and well, maybe she screwed up. At that point, how do you convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy intentionally conspired to violate immigration laws? Especially since the nominal owner might not be the actual owner. So the assistant US attorney assigned to the case (and 50 others) recommends pushing for a plea deal of 6 months in prison. Dodgy Contractor, Inc. is shut down. The Hotel is SHOCKED to learn that they had illegals working for them. The next week, they hire Sketchy Contractor, Inc. and we Americans keep getting our trips to Las Vegas with hotels costing only $120 a night.
By the way, I'm not saying that it's impossible to enforce immigration laws. I'm just taking exception to the idea that it's simple and easy.
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