White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is getting exactly what he wants: One in seven people arrested as part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s sweeping raids in Los Angeles earlier this month had no criminal convictions, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Between June 1 and June 10, ICE arrested 722 individuals across the greater Los Angeles area. But 69 percent of those arrested had no criminal conviction, and 58 percent had never even been charged with a crime, according to a Times analysis published Tuesday of data from UC Berkeley Law’s Data Deportation Project.
Despite the Trump administration’s hollow assurances that ICE would target criminals, the reality of the government’s massive deportation scheme has targeted average upstanding individuals, ripping family members, friends, and neighbors out of their communities.
But to Miller, who is on a campaign to ethnically cleanse the country, that must be music to his ears.
As ICE’s sweep of Los Angeles began at the beginning of June, Miller was reportedly furious when he heard that ICE officers had narrowed their field to undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” one official recalled after a tense meeting between the ghoulish homeland security adviser and officials from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
But DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisted to the Times that ICE arrests were “highly targeted.”
“We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability,” McLaughlin said. But reports of other arrests suggest that ICE will detain someone even if they know they’re not the target.
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