On January 23, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman authorized several Justice Department agencies to arrest people suspected of entering the country without documentation. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the US Marshals Service have all been granted immigration-enforcement authority, as President Donald Trump begins his second term with a wave of mass deportations.
The move follows one of Trump’s January 20 executive orders, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” While the DOJ agencies have more power to conduct investigations and make arrests, deportation itself is still the purview of DHS agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“Other agencies do not have authority to… start the removal proceedings, nor to physically deport them from the United States,” Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based attorney specializing in immigration law, told Filter. “That happens in the venue of the immigration courts.”
Though ICE’s enforcement and removal operations already focus heavily on people with drug possession convictions, the DEA’s involvement stands to increase that. The newly deputized agencies within the DOJ have begun coordinating large-scale sweeps in Chicago, and Atlanta and other cities across the country.
In a January 26 social media post, ICE reported that it made 956 arrests and lodged 554 detainers—when a jail or prison continues to hold someone already in custody on the agency’s behalf—which according to CNN was higher than any other single-day total the agency has reported on previous posts. On January 27, the ICE reported 1,179 arrests and 853 detainers.
The agency has reportedly been assigned a quota wherein each of its 25 field houses around the country must make at least 75 new arrests each day. This would mean over 1,800 total per day, while prior to Trump’s inauguration the agency was making a few hundred per day on average. A White House spokesperson told the Washington Post that the quotas are “fake news.”
“What we’re gonna see is ICE and these collaborating federal agencies now being forced to go after mom and dad, grandma and grandpa,” Kuck said. “Folks who’ve been here for 20, 30 or 40 years.”
Trump’s other immigration enforcement actions include moving to end birthright citizenship, which a federal court judge has said is unconstitutional, and to revoke citizenship from potentially hundreds of of thousands of people who’d immigrated to the country legally.
“ICE already has a database of 1.5 million people with active deportation orders,” Kuck said. “Even if they focused only on them, they would be busy for the next four years.”
Image (cropped) of January 26 raid via Immigration and Customs Enforcement