The White House Marching Orders That Sparked the L.A. Migrant Crackdown
After deportations fell short of President Trump’s campaign promises, federal agents summoned to a meeting in Washington were told to ‘just go out there and arrest illegal aliens’
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“Even with the
high-profile arrests of suspects by masked immigration agents and the plane loads of migrants swiftly ferried out of the U.S., President Trump was falling short of the number of daily
deportations carried out by the Biden administration in its final year.
So in late May, Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of the president’s immigration agenda, addressed a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The message was clear: The president, who promised to
deport millionsof immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased. The agency had better step it up.
Gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the “worst of the worst,” weren’t the sole target of deportations.
Federal agents needed to “
just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, who had come from across the U.S., according to people familiar with the meeting.
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target
Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores.
Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away. …”
