Sending the National Guard is bad. Arresting 3,000 a day is worse.

Washington Post

4 days ago

ICE agents making arrests in the parking lot of a Home Depot helped set off mass protests in Los Angeles. But that wasn't an isolated incident. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is increasingly taking actions at courthouses, restaurants and other spaces it previously stayed away from.
President Donald Trump and his top aides have long favored harsh immigration policies. But what's shifted in recent weeks is that the administration has set a specific goal of ICE arresting at least 3,000 people per day.Such a quota may help Trump accomplish his goals, but it is leading to overly aggressive tactics that are deeply unsettling Americans across the country.
It was perhaps inevitable that a president who promised to deport more people than his predecessors would implement an arrest quota. In the first months of Trump's tenure, the number of deportations and ICE arrests wasn't that much higher than when President Joe Biden was in office. That reportedly frustrated Trump administration officials, particularly Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. So last month, Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem privately gave ICE leaders — and then publicly confirmed — the goal of making 3,000 arrests per day. The administration also replaced ICE's leadership with people it felt would be more aggressive.
That's a huge increase: The agency was making between 700 and 900 arrests per day at the end of Biden's term and the start of Trump's. And it appears this new policy is being carried out. ICE officials say they arrested 2,267 people on June 3 and 2,368 on June 4.
It's possible these numbers are being inflated by the agency to please Trump and Miller. But there are articles in news outlets across the country about unprecedented ICE enforcement actions in their communities, so I believe the agency is going beyond its usual moves.
But this policy is misguided. Quotas are problematic in many contexts. I support increased gender and racial diversity but am wary of organizations trying to hire a set number of women and people of color. In law enforcement, they are more troublesome. Police officers operating under quota systems feel pushed to make arrests for minor offenses. They sometimes target not the most dangerous people but those who are easiest to apprehend.
That's what's happening now. Undocumented immigrants showing up to court hearings, working at clothing stores or looking to get Home Depot customers to hire them for day labor are probably not leading human trafficking organizations on the side. I am deeply concerned that ICE will soon start making arrests at schools and hospitals, since those are other places where you can arrest lots of people at once — few of whom will be armed or dangerous.
I am opposed to these arrests in part because I don't support Trump's overarching goals of deporting 1 million immigrants a year and creating a climate in which other undocumented immigrants return to their native countries on their own. But you could argue that while Trump did not specifically campaign on 3,000 arrests per day, he promised to crack down on undocumented immigrants, and Americans elected him, so the public wants this.
It's hard to determine why people voted for a candidate and what kind of mandate that gives them. But even if Trump campaigned explicitly on arresting 3,000 people a day, we should be wary of that policy — and not just because quotas generally aren't smart.
This particular quota is excessive. If ICE arrested 3,000 a people a day, that would add up to about 1.1 million arrests after a year. There are about 11.7 million undocumented people in the United States. So if no individual was arrested more than once, about 9 percent of undocumented immigrants would be arrested in a given year under this policy. Arresting 9 percent of any group would almost certainly result in the other 91 percent being constantly worried about being arrested or jailed.
And because about three quarters of undocumented immigrants are from Central or South America, some U.S. citizens and authorized residents who are Brown almost certainly will be unjustly arrested or questioned by ICE. This arrest quota echoes stop-and-frisk policies many police departments used to employ. At the height of that approach, there were about 350,000 stops of the 1.9 million Black New Yorkers. Basically every Black New Yorker had to be on guard for being stopped and frisked, and a judge invalidated the program on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory.
Miller and Trump may want all 11.7 million undocumented immigrants to live in terror. But the rest of us shouldn't. The overwhelming majority of those people came to the United States seeking a better life. If we want to deter future immigrants, cracking down on employers who hire undocumented people and making it harder to enter the country in the first place are obvious solutions. Making life excessively difficult for people already here will probably discourage future migrants, but the U.S. government should not be in the business of rushing into restaurants and courthouses with guns to arrest people for the purpose of scaring others into leaving the country.
Many Democratic politicians and political commentators have criticized Trump for deploying the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to stop the protests of ICE's actions in Los Angeles. But Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson rightly invoked the National Guard, without support from governors, to integrate schools and defend civil rights marches respectively. The problem isn't that Trump is using the National Guard; it's that he's using the National Guard to defend a policy that will target people of color indiscriminately and inhumanely. The quota must go.