The U.S. Border Patrol is reportedly shifting away from sweeping immigration raids, such as those at Home Depot and other locations, to make operations more tailored to specific individuals, according to a report.
Under senior Border Patrol officer Gregory Bovino, teams will begin focusing their attention on specific targets, including undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes, Homeland Security sources told NewsNation.
Since enforcement operations began, the administration claims it is targeting “the worst of the worst,” but government data indicate less than 30 percent of those detained or deported had a criminal conviction.
Instead, the administration has been conducting raids at locations where larger populations of undocumented immigrants live or work. Among those rounded up and deported have been veterans of the U.S. military, the parents of U.S. citizen children, students on visas, and hundreds of thousands of others.
As a result, President Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration has sunk from 49 percent in April to 38 percent in December, according to an AP-NORC poll.
Seemingly, to improve public approval of immigration raids, Border Patrol is changing up its tactics.
However, in a statement to The Independent, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security appeared to contradict NewsNation’s report, saying, “We have always been going after the worst of the worst first. There are no operational changes to announce.”
Ongoing sweeping operations, such as “Catahoula Crunch” in New Orleans, are expected to continue, NewsNation reported.
Those sweeping operations, which have been conducted in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., Portland and other cities, have received widespread negative attention for the aggressive tactics Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other departments have used.
Members of the communities have pushed back on law enforcement, leading to clashes between protesters and immigration enforcement throughout the country.
A signature pillar of Trump’s agenda is mass deportation. On the campaign trail, he promised to deport undocumented immigrants whom he falsely characterized as “criminals.” In the administration, officials such as Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of Trump’s immigration deportations, have pressured officials to increase deportation numbers.
It’s under that pressure that enforcement officials have conducted the sweeping operations.
