Congress, don’t give Trump’s ‘deportation force’ a blank check

At this point, it is no secret that the Trump Administration is following through on the president’s threats of increased immigration enforcement. It has already ramped up its indiscriminate arrests: Under President Trump’s new policies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has more than doubled apprehensions of people who are undocumented and do not have criminal records.

Who are the victims of this new immigration dragnet? 

People like Maribel Trujillo Diaz, a mother of four U.S.-citizen children from the ages of 3 to 14, the youngest of whom suffers from epilepsy. Maribel was arrested around a decade ago in a workplace raid at a chicken processing plant, but allowed to remain the United States as long as she periodically checked in with ICE. She had lived in the U.S. for 15 years when she was arrested unexpectedly in April, despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record. Over the protests of Ohio’s governor and both its senators, Maribel was deported to Mexico two weeks later.

{mosads}And then there’s Nury Chavarria, who has lived in Connecticut for 24 years. ICE has not considered her a priority for enforcement in the past, given that she has four U.S.-citizen children who rely on her and no criminal record. The last time she asked to renew her stay of removal, though, ICE allowed her to file the request, but also told her she had to buy a plane ticket back to Guatemala. She is terrified she will have to leave her four children in the U.S. without a parent or caretaker, including her oldest son, who has cerebral palsy, and her youngest daughter who is just 9 years old.

Do you feel safer now? Me neither. 

We don’t have to find anecdotal cases to know this is happening, though. We can look at the administration’s own statements. The new enforcement “priorities” are so broad that they make almost everyone who is undocumented a priority for arrest.

A leaked internal memo essentially requires ICE officers to arrest anyone without status who they encounter, despite a long-standing history of prosecutorial discretion in the immigration context. ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan bluntly stated in a Congressional hearing that people who are undocumented should be afraid and “look over (their) shoulder.”

ICE is already implementing these inhumane, wasteful policies — policies that rip apart families and hurt our economy — with all-time-high levels of funding. However, some members of Congress want to take it a (huge) step further and provide even more money to supercharge President’s Trump’s deportation machine. The funding bill released by the House Appropriations Committee on July 12 effectively writes the administration a blank check to implement its mass deportation plan, allowing ICE and CBP to hire 1,500 new officers, detain thousands more people, and waste money on an ineffective, expensive border wall.

Take a second to let that sink in: Congress is looking at spending billions more taxpayer dollars to arrest contributing members of our families, communities, and economies at the same time that they’re slashing funding to disaster-preparedness programs at FEMA and vital TSA projects, as well as other domestic programs that benefit Americans.

Make no mistake, if funded, this will be an unprecedented expansion of President Trump’s deportation force. The question for members of Congress is clear: do you want to use your constituents’ taxpayer dollars on programs that will help them, their families, and their communities? Or do you want to cave in to President’s Trump’s demands for a massive deportation force? 

Kate Voigt serves as Associate Director for Government Relations, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and is an expert on immigration law and policy. She holds a JD from Boston College Law School.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.