Over the weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 100 people in Memphis, the largest raid in the city’s history, according to local immigrant rights groups. One raid took place at a bar in which ICE rolled up with a fleet of rented buses at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. Officers were allegedly intimidating witnesses by demanding they delete recordings and shining lights into people’s cameras. Memphis Mayor Paul Young and others condemned the raid and its part in President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
“When we say this administration is trying to reshape our nation in their narrow white nationalist vision, this is what it looks like: disappearing our families, neighbors, friends and co-workers in the night with no regard for the devastation they leave behind,” Lisa Sherman Luna, director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, told local WLPN news.
Memphis lends a small snapshot of what is happening across the country, as ICE arrests and deports more people than ever, according to NBC News, citing new data for August, continuing the record streak of roughly 50,000 arrests in July. For example, more than 1,300 people in Virginia and Maryland were arrested over just two weeks. Many of the recent arrestees among the 300,000 Haitian migrants who lost their legal status in the country thanks to a June Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to end their temporary protected status.
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A big part of how ICE is achieving these records is by getting quieter in how they operate and by leaning more on local law enforcement to conduct arrests through a program known as 287(g). Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has overall been much more subtle than his predecessor Kristi Noem, whose high-profile “sieges” of cities like Minneapolis resulted in the deaths of American citizens at the hands of ICE.
But ICE also has more resources than ever before. So far this year, the agency has hired more than 12,000 people, doubling its size. And in June, House Republicans passed a roughly $70 billion package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term.