Asif Youssuff

Thoughts on Local Media Coverage on Immigration

I generally feel that I am reasonably well informed about what’s going on in the news. That changed over the last week and into this one, with the barrage of executive orders from the newly minted second Trump administration, the coverage of ICE raids on workplaces, the new DHS secretary cosplaying on a raid, and the news that undocumented people are going to be housed at Guantanamo Bay.

I felt out of my depth as the news of the ICE raids continued, and local media reports seemed to be leaving out a lot of context. The news reported that ICE was targeting “criminals”, but continued to explain that many of those being picked up were being deported – seemingly without paying for their crimes. Others were to be held for processing in immigration courts.

Superficially, it didn’t make sense. Why was the US letting criminals evade justice? Why would we spend time and money tracking down people who committed crimes and simply let them go back to their home country so that they could return?

As the raids continued, the administration’s press secretary confirmed that they consider any undocumented individual to be a criminal saying that “They illegally broke our nation’s laws and, therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes,” which explains that part of it; the raids aren’t all that concerned about what crimes people committed.

This is important to my secondary question – since as Axios reports, “being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one” – that means that even though it is the White House’s position that everyone without legal status has committed a crime, it seems that they cannot be jailed - since their offense isn’t criminal.

Axios continues to explain that:

Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.

An Axios review of data for nearly 180,000 ICE at-large arrests from October 1, 2017, through Sept. 30, 2023, found that the most common charges for undocumented immigrants were driving under the influence (15%) and those involving drugs (15%), assaults (9%) and other traffic offenses (9%). 3% of the arrests involved larceny, 1.7% involved sexual assaults and 0.7% were linked to homicides.

While ICE says that “The worst go first”, a significant change has taken place since the new administration took over: “Under Trump, officers can now arrest people without legal status if they run across them while looking for migrants targeted for removal. Under Joe Biden, such ‘collateral arrests’ were banned.”

So while the media places a lot of focus on “the worst”, the raids often manage to ensnare ordinary, non-“worst” people - including U.S. military veterans. The coverage I observed showed the media unquestioningly parroting the government narrative, without confirming the depth of the criminality of those detained. It feels like the local news is an organ of the state in not questioning the narrative.

While we can understand the administration now means anyone who is undocumented is a criminal, they have claimed that more than 7,300 deportees have been removed since Trump took office, “including hundreds of convicted criminals”. In New York, The Washington Post reported that of the 20 arrested, eight did not have violent criminal records.

The focus on vanity metrics isn’t just a tech phenomenon, since ICE has been directed to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500. Paul Hunker, a former ICE chief counsel who oversaw offices in North Texas and Oklahoma from 2003 through January 2024, said arresting serious offenders takes time, staff and planning — more time than quotas might allow: “Quotas will incentivize ICE officers to arrest the easiest people to arrest, rather than the people that are dangerous noncitizens.”

Clearly, since the administration is not convicting them, my reading is that those whom they refer to as having criminal records must have been convicted by a foreign government (please educate me if I am wrong, this is the best I have gleaned over reading media reports).

Is the fact that people are being deported without being convicted by our government a tacit admission of the fact that being present and undocumented isn’t a crime?

Trump himself characterizes the operations as targeting criminals: “These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen,” he told reporters Friday. “We’re taking them out first.”

While I understand the appeal of proclaiming that there are fewer murderers on the street, I don’t understand why the administration wouldn’t want more assurances that these murderers wouldn’t be back on the streets in a few months when the cameras have turned elsewhere.

When watching coverage of the raids initially, my impression was that citizens were meant to believe that in addition to striking fear in ordinary undocumented folks, that we were also getting bad people off of the streets. If those “bad people” are people that my government is willing to ship back home and wash our hands of, are they that bad? Perplexing.

Since some of the deportees have arrived to their home countries, we can learn a bit more about the people who were deported.

Of 200 deported Colombians, Colombian officials say that none were criminals. Included in that count were two pregnant women and more than 20 children.

Cool.

It’s not all fun and games, though.

The latest news goes from ineffectual and expensive to terrifying.

How, you ask?

Two things: the passage of Laken Riley Act and the announcement that the US government will build a new facility to house undocumented people at Guantanamo Bay.

The law (which passed with Democratic support) requires the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of theft and violent crimes.

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a New York Democrat said: “In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they would be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court.”

Scary enough when it’s a US detention facility or jail.

How about if the detention camp is somewhere where the US Constitution doesn’t apply?

The Scream: a composition created by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch
The Scream


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