10 Executive orders on Immigration have been signed in President Donald Trump's first week in office.
“Some actions were felt immediately. Others face legal challenges. Some may take years to happen, if ever, but have generated fear in immigrant communities,” The Associated Press said.
In the span of 5 days, Thursday through Monday, during his first week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said they made an average of 710 immigration arrests daily.
“ICE averaged 376 arrests a day in the government’s four fiscal years that align most closely with the first Trump administration, from 2017 to 2020,” AP said.
Numbers started spiking the Sunday after Trump’s Inauguration and some operations became highly publicized. Atlanta, Dallas, and most prominently Chicago, were some of the more publicized.
“Top Trump administration officials, including “border czar” Tom Homan and the acting deputy attorney general, visited Chicago on Sunday to witness the start of ramped-up immigration enforcement in the nation’s third-largest city as federal agencies touted arrests around the country,” AP said.
Chicago has some of the strongest sanctuary protections, baring cooperation between city police officers and immigration officers.
“Immigrant rights groups have tried to prepare for the aggressive crackdown with campaigns for immigrants to know their rights in case of an arrest. City officials have done the same, publishing similar information at public bus and train stations,” AP said.
Chicago Public Schools mistakenly believed ICE agents had come to a city elementary school before learning that it was the Secret Service.
“Word of immigration agents at a school — which have long been off limits to immigration agents until Trump ended the policy last week — drew swift criticism from community groups and Gov. JB Pritzker,” AP said.
Pritzker questioned the approach that is being made and is worried about immigrants who are law abiding.
“‘We need to get rid of the violent criminals. But we also need to protect people, at least the residents of Illinois and all across the nation, who are just doing what we hope that immigrants will do,’ Pritzker said Sunday on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’,” AP said.
Trump has expanded his arrest limits to people who are here illegally, not just those with criminal convictions.
“He anticipates more enforcement in the next few weeks and believes Congress will approve funding for up to 80,000 beds, about double the current level,” AP said. “ICE needs the space to hold people while any legal proceedings play out and while it arranges deportations.”
As of January 29, Trump has ordered the creation of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay that could hold up to 30,000 people.
“He said the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house ‘the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people’,” BBC reporters Bernd Debusmann Jr and Will Grant said.
The announcement came when he signed the Laken Riley Act into law, named after a nursing student who was killed by a venezuelan migrant, which requires undocumented immigrants to be held in jail pending trial for their crimes.
“At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the new Guantanamo executive order would instruct the departments of defence and homeland security to "begin preparing" the 30,000-bed facility,” Debusmann Jr and Grant said.
The U.S. already has a facility in Guantanamo which holds detainees taken into custody after the attacks on 9/11.
“News of the facility's expansion was met with swift condemnation by the Cuban government, which has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be "occupied" and has denounced the existence of a US naval base on the island ever since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959,” Debusmann Jr and Grant said.
A Senate committee spent hours hearing testimony against Senate Bill 72 (SB 72) in Missouri on January 27. SB 72 has not yet been voted on in committee.
“SB 72 would include life imprisonment without parole as a punishment, and would allow Missourians to collect $1,000 bounties for reporting people who are in the country without legal status,” Missouri Statehouse Reporting Intern for St. Louis Public Radio & River City Journalism Fund (npr) Evy Lewis said.
The State Department has asked groups providing temporary housing, job training and other support to stop their work and the Justice Department has told legal aid groups to stop working on federal programs that help people in immigration courts and detention centers navigate the law along with many other efforts, some of which are being legally challenged.
“Trump said he was ending automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, a precedent established by constitutional amendment in 1868. A federal judge in Seattle has put it on hold,” AP said.
