MSNBC’s Morning Joe tore into the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown after shock revelations ICE has arrested only a tiny fraction of those described as the most dangerous migrants.
“The thing that we heard time and again was ‘the worst of the worst’, the violent offenders. It wasn’t those who ran red lights or were caught speeding five miles an hour faster than the speed limit,” host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday.
“When did the Trump administration go from having as their goal getting the ‘worst of the worst’ and getting the violent offenders, to deciding they’re going to do sweeps at Home Depot?” he asked.
It comes after data obtained exclusively by NBC revealed that of the 13,000 immigrants to the United States known to have committed murder, less than 6% have been detained by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration officials since Donald Trump assumed office in January.
ICE has also, according to NBC’s report, detained at most 11% of the total 15,811 immigrants convicted of sexual assault. By contrast, only a third of the overall number detained so far have any criminal background at all.
Speaking with NBC reporter Julia Ainsley, who authored that report, Scarborough asked on Wednesday when exactly it would appear that the Trump administration went from targeting “the worst of the worst” to picking up “hotel workers and people on farms.’
“I think there were two points when they majorly ramped that up,” Ainsley replied, pointing to the establishment of quotas for immigration officials with “just the first week of the Trump administration,” and when in mid-May White House aide Stephen Miller allegedly began calling ICE chiefs to threaten them with dismissal if they didn’t start “arresting 3,000 [people] a day.”
“It’s much harder to arrest criminals, people who are hiding from the law and know how to do that,” she added. “It’s a lot easier to go to a place where people are just going about their daily lives, taking their kids to school, going to work, and make large sweeps there.”
The Department of Homeland Security has denied the veracity of NBC’s claims, but not yet produced hard numbers to counter them.
