Do people think that ICE has gone too far?
A NY Times/Siena poll conducted ln late September asked people if they felt that ICE had gone too far in enforcing immigration laws. The respondents were roughly evenly split overall. The poll website headlines, “Majority Support Deportation of Illegal Immigrants, But Describe the Process as Unfair.” Positions on immigration in general have hardened in the past six months, with more persons citing “strongly” approve or disapprove now compared to April.
As for going too far, let’s look at some segments. The cross tabs I downloaded appear in some in cells to be paradoxical, and I will stick with a half dozen which has plausible responses, focusing on those who say ICE has not gone too far (usually by mid 50s vs mid 40s). those approving include persons over 64, White, Black, non-white college, white college and Trump non white. Hispanics strongly disapprove. I am not confident about the reliability of these results. It’s prudent at this point (late October) to surmise that a large segment of Americans, perhaps half, do not consider ICE as over-reaching. For Trump to pull back may require a big news event similar in impact to civil rights activists in the early 1960s being set upon by police dogs.
How to characterize recent ICE activity
On October 14, Politico quoted John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director:
‘I don’t think we’ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this. During the Obama administration, we did a large number of nationwide operations, but they’re very targeted. They’re the kind of work where you’re going after specific individuals, people that you knew had a criminal history. They were carefully selected. There was a lot of research and investigation done before you went out to make the actual arrest. These are much more akin to area sweeps, where they’re going out and just stopping people in the streets, or working in conjunction with other law enforcement as they execute traffic stops, or hitting a large number of apartments in a building where you suspect people are undocumented. We’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, the deployment of FBI agents and other law enforcement agents to supplement DHS efforts, the pulling of these border patrol agents into these urban cities. All of this is unprecedented.
This administration has repurposed the way they’ve operationalized ICE — to go out and get as many people as possible, and that’s why we’re seeing these raids on the car washes and on the Home Depot parking lots. They know they can make a large number of arrests there, and they don’t seem to care whether or not those people pose a threat to public safety. They just say, “If you’re undocumented, you’re a fair target.”