ICE officers in Minnesota were directed on Wednesday to avoid engaging with “agitators” as they carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, according to internal guidance reviewed by Reuters. The new guidance, offering the most detailed look so far at how operations would change after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens protesting in Minneapolis, also orders U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers only to target immigrants who have criminal charges or convictions.
[1] They were also supposed to leave people alone who were only charged with crimes - let the legal system (creaky as it is) decide guilt or innocence first, have the guilty serve their time, and then deport them.
[2] They were supposed to be targeting only those with felony convictions, not someone who bounced a check forty years ago.
All of this chaos is at least partially driven by the quotas the regime has imposed on ICE. I mean, if an immigrant is a murderer who has successfully hidden from ICE for a couple decades, they’re not going to be easy to find, and ICE will find one or two of them a week.
You know who is easy to find? People checking into their flights at the airport. People turning up for their mandatory immigration status meeting. People showing up for court dates. People going to work in a sector with a lot of immigrants. Etc.
And the thing is, the people in charge knew this would happen, they expected and encouraged it to happen, they wanted it to happen this way. But by putting in quotas, it allows them distance and deniability from the actual implementation and chaos that ensues. They can go on Faux and say both, “We’re going after these people with everything we have” and “Well, there was a misunderstanding about [what | how] they were supposed to do things on the ground”.