Slate: Days of Deportation — Sixty scenes of immigration enforcement in the age of Trump
To mark President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Department of Homeland Security posted a multimedia update on its website featuring video of faceless federal agents placing handcuffs on a series of suspects. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had detained some 41,000 undocumented immigrants in that period—a 38 percent year-on-year increase—which, according to the site, reflects “President Trump’s commitment to enforce our immigration laws.” The update listed the names of now-detained immigrants who had been wanted for murder, following similar announcements from ICE highlighting detentions of rapists and kidnappers.
But fewer than 9 percent of the detainees whom ICE calls “criminal aliens” have been connected to crimes of violence. When ICE detained 84 foreign nationals in a sweep of the Pacific Northwest, for example, their press release led with the arrest of a previously deported Mexican man charged with the rape of a child. The agency did not mention 21-year-old Emmanuel Ayala Frutos, who had come to the United States when he was 6 and was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status in 2013. In February, he entered a plea in a county court for possession of a butterfly knife. The judge in the case said Ayala Frutos posed no danger to the community; nevertheless, ICE agents picked him up at his Portland, Oregon, home and detained him for 19 days.
There’s a gulf between Ayala Frutos’ story and the story ICE tells. To close that gap, the Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Project has been working to build a database of Trump-era immigration enforcement, scouring public sources from news reports to federal court filings. The team then selected a single event for every day in a 60-day period and distilled each into a short scene. The 60 days begin on Feb. 20, when DHS issued a pair of memos outlining how it would enforce Trump’s hardline stance on immigration: by broadening the definition of “priorities for removal,” hiring thousands more agents, deputizing local police to aid in arrests, loosening criteria for deportation, and more.
Slate’s latest cover story, Days of Deportation, which collects sixty scenes of immigration enforcement in the age of Trump. Here’s a link. Based on research from Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Project, the stories highlighted here include individuals arrested for traffic violations and jailed overnight, farm workers detained on the way to jobs, people arrested by ICE while at their green card appointments (a true catch-22), and deported parents forced to leave their American-born children behind.
KJ