Trump's under-the-radar immigration dragnet
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ICE gets all the attention, but a new cluster of joint task forces is quietly becoming a potent part of President Trump's mass deportations push.
Why it matters: A single joint task force raid last weekend in San Antonio netted more arrests than ICE and Border Patrol's high-profile entry into Charlotte, North Carolina.
- The Texas raid, which targeted alleged Tren de Aragua gang members, resulted in more than 140 arrests, Axios San Antonio reported. Two days of surged enforcement in Charlotte totaled 130, according to press statements for the respective operations.
- The San Antonio operation also resulted in more arrests than a similar operation in Chicago with federal agents and a Black Hawk helicopter, which caught 37 people.
Zoom in: The task forces, co-led by the FBI and ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit, will eventually have outposts in all 50 states. They're up and running in South Texas, Alaska and Indianapolis.
- They'll have a centralized command center led by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Kristi Noem, with a mandate to combat cartels, international gangs and terror groups.
- The task forces were established by a Day One Executive Order from Trump and began "full implementation" in September, according to the FBI.
- Immigrants without status caught in the investigations will either be deported or used "to pursue investigations and prosecution of those individuals," said Section Chief Mark Remily, who leads the Bureau's Transnational Organized Crime Program.
Zoom out: ICE has so far done high-profile operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, with one planned after Thanksgiving in New Orleans.
- The immigration enforcement agency touts the arrests of the "worst of the worst." But it's behind on the administration's ambitious goal of 3,000 arrests a day and one million deportations per year.
- To boost stats, the agency has turned to Border Patrol agents, who have used more aggressive tactics to make arrests, to aid its mission.
- The result has also led to community resistance as well as lawsuits over excessive use of force, arrests of U.S. citizens and warrantless arrests.
Between the lines: The new task forces are drawing agents to their mission, as concerns grow that thousands of law enforcement officers are being assigned to the immigration agenda instead of their prior roles, as the New York Times investigated.
- The priority shift has led to a drop in investigations on child trafficking, sex crimes and time-sensitive tracking of sanctioned products, like oil from Iran, the Times reports.
- "D.H.S. keeps being pulled further away from its core missions in protecting the homeland," David Lapan, who served as DHS press secretary during the first Trump administration, told the Times.
The bottom line: "The government has never had a one centralized location to really combat and coordinate the transnational criminal threats that we target," Remily said on the FBI's in-house podcast.
