Immigrant arrests in courts across the country are on the rise, as Homeland Security officials ramp up enforcement actions in efforts to carry out the Trump administration's promise of deporting at least 1 million people this year.
From Arizona, to California, New York and beyond, immigration enforcement agents are increasingly making a presence outside of courtrooms, waiting for migrants to arrive at their routine legal appointments, to easily take them into custody and quickly start the deportation process.
According to The Associated Press, at least three U.S. immigration officials said government attorneys were given the order to start dismissing cases when they showed up for work Monday, hence giving federal agents a free hand to arrest those same individuals as soon as they stepped out of the courtroom.
AP reporters also said they witnessed detentions and arrests or spoke to attorneys whose clients were picked up at immigration courthouses in Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York, Seattle, Chicago and Texas.
In Arizona, at least a dozen migrants were handcuffed by unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents Tuesday and Wednesday after a morning of immigration hearing sessions. On Wednesday night, it remained unclear if the migrants were taken to local detention centers or to other states, Isaac Ortega, a Phoenix-based immigration attorney said.
In Los Angeles, Lindsay Toczylowski, the president and co-founder of Immigration Defenders, said ICE agents inside immigration courtrooms began detaining people after government attorneys moved to dismiss their cases. "By arresting them post-dismissal, they will now try to put them in expedited removal proceedings and move towards deportations at lightning speed," she said in social media.
The latest deportation campaign includes migrants who have no criminal records, migrants with no legal representation and people who are seeking asylum, according to reports received by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, known as AILA. While detentions have been happening over the past few months, on Tuesday the number of reports skyrocketed, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at AILA.
The new tactic is also a change to ICE's practices of not arresting migrants near immigration courts, which are run by the Justice Department. In previous years, when they occurred, it was usually because the individual was charged with a criminal offense or their asylum claim had been denied.
"All this is to accelerate detentions and expedite removals," said immigration attorney Wilfredo Allen, who has represented migrants at Miami courts for decades.
ICE said in a statement to AP News that it was detaining people who are subject to fast-track deportation authority, though it provided little details about the process of detaining and then deporting these migrants.
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