In a new court filing, attorneys for the Trump administration denied the existence of a daily quota for immigration arrests, despite reports and prior statements from White House officials about pursuing a goal of at least 3,000 deportations or deportation arrests per day.
In May, reports from both the Guardian and Axios revealed that during a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders on 21 May, the White House adviser Stephen Miller and the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people per day.
Following that report, Miller appeared on Fox News in late May and stated that “under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for Ice every day.”
He added that Trump “is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day”.
However, in a court filing on Friday, lawyers representing the US justice department said that the Department of Homeland Security had confirmed that “neither Ice leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that Ice or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law.”
The filing is part of an ongoing lawsuit in southern California, where immigrant advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, accusing it of conducting unconstitutional immigration sweeps in the Los Angeles area.
In mid-July a judge issued a temporary restraining order barring immigration agents from detaining individuals based on factors such as race, occupation or speaking Spanish anywhere in the central district of California, which includes Los Angeles. On Friday, an appeals court upheld that order.
Politico reported that during a hearing earlier this week in the case, the justice department lawyers were pressed on the reports regarding the alleged arrest quota, and a judge reportedly asked whether it was a “policy of the administration at this time to deport 3,000 persons per day?”.
An attorney for the justice department, Yaakov Roth, reportedly responded “Not to my knowledge, your honor” per Politico.
And in the government’s filing on Friday, the attorneys for the government said that the allegations of that the “government maintains a policy mandating 3,000 arrests per day appears to originate from media reports quoting a White House advisor who described that figure as a ‘goal’ that the Administration was ‘looking to set’”.
“That quotation may have been accurate, but no such goal has been set as a matter of policy and no such directive has been issued to or by DHS or ICE” the attorneys added.
The discrepancy was first reported by the Los Angeles Daily News and Politico.
Neither DHS or Ice immediately responded to a request fro comment from the Guardian.
In a statement to Politico, a White House spokesperson did not directly respond to questions about the discrepancy, but said that “the Trump Administration is committed to carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in history by enforcing federal immigration law and removing the countless violent, criminal illegal aliens that Joe Biden let flood into American communities.”
A justice department spokesperson told the outlet that there is no disconnect between the DoJ’s court filings and the White House’s public statements.
The spokesperson added that “the entire Trump administration is united in fully enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and the DoJ continues to play an important role in vigorously defending the president’s deportation agenda in court.”
At various points during his 2024 election campaign, Trump claimed that he would target between 15 and 20 million people who are undocumented in the US for deportation.
As of 2022, there were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
