Stephen Miller’s figures that one million immigrants have already self-deported are false, according to a senior fellow from a pro-immigrant nonprofit organization.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, from American Immigration Council, called Miller’s claims “a completely made-up figure” in an interview with Slate’s podcast Amicus.
The emphasis on self-deportation aims to “spread fear through these undocumented communities,” he says, following the significant quota increase Miller implemented after meeting with 25 field office directors of the ICE Homeland Security Investigations.
Unsatisfied with the pace of arrests, Miller set a quota of 3,000 arrests per day, allegedly lashing out at ICE agents for failing to reach numbers that were promised by the administration.
“From now on, it was about quantity over quality,” the official said.
Since then, ICE raids in America have become largely more prevalent and aggressive, with some agents allegedly resorting to tactics like racial profiling for probable cause for arrests. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, told Fox News that ICE agents had probable causes to arrest individuals based on “location, their observation, their physical appearance, [and] their actions.”
ICE agents were allegedly ordered to stake out places like Home Depot and 7-Eleven, where migrants commonly find work.
Fear-mongering migrants into self-deporting serves the purpose of helping the Trump administration reach their own quota marks, Reichlin-Melnick explained, especially in sanctuary cities like Los Angeles where there are currently 951,000 undocumented immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
“It would still take them [ICE] decades to arrest every undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles. That is what I mean when I say there are two primary missions: mass deportations and getting people to self-deport," Reichlin-Melnick said.
“But the goal is to send the message that everybody’s doing it, they’re all leaving: ‘If you leave now, then you won’t have to worry about this happening to you. You won’t have to worry about being thrown on the ground by Border Patrol, shoved into a detention center, and treated poorly, if you just go home now.’”
Ultimately, Reichlin-Melnick argued that the biggest changes in deporting migrants has been the tactics utilized and the people who are targeted.
Before the second Trump administration, ICE agents arrested specific individuals, often from a list. But under Miller’s authority, Reichlin-Melnick claimed the “use of so-called collateral arrests” heavily increased, “where they would not just arrest the one person they had on their target list, but if that person was near anyone else, they would just question those people about their statuses and arrest anyone they found who was undocumented."
“And so, in some ways, the more attention paid and the more people see these videos of outrage, the more DHS is gladdened because it means that people are getting the message that no one is safe.”
The White House pushed back against Reichlin-Melnick claims.
“Melnick is an irrelevant, unapologetic advocate for criminal illegal aliens and has no idea what he’s talking about,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.
