Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has directed agents to increase daily immigration arrests to 3,000 — about 19,000 a week — in the weeks before the November midterm elections, CNN reported.
The Department of Homeland Security denied that officers work to any fixed number.
ICE had been taking an average of about 2,000 people into custody each day, CNN reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The agency had previously set a target of 3,000 arrests per day and is now pressing agents to reach it. Because fewer officers work in the field on weekends, ICE instructed agents to aim for 19,000 arrests per week so that weekday totals make up the shortfall. The Daily Beast also reported the directive, saying it came amid unease among some Republicans over who is being arrested.
A DHS spokesperson told CNN there is “no fixed number” of people its officers must arrest. “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin’s leadership, ICE has been supercharged to find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens from the United States using every lawful tool available,” the spokesperson said, calling the effort “promises made, promises kept.” CTN does not use the term “illegal” to describe people in its own reporting; the word is the agency’s.
Speaking last month on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he had “never talked to anybody at the White House about any quota,” adding, “We do our job every single day, and we do it effectively.” He said the agency’s focus is “to go after the worst of the worst,” but that “when we make contact with an illegal, regardless of how many years you’ve been here, we are obligated by statute to at that point arrest you.”
The push follows months of climbing arrest totals.
Arrests fell to 29,241 in February, after a backlash over the killings of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, a nurse, by federal agents during immigration operations in Minnesota in January, according to Associated Press reporting on the enforcement data. Arrests then rose to 43,021 in June and to nearly 49,600 in July, which the AP reported at the time was the highest monthly total of President Donald Trump’s second term. By August, the figure reached roughly 51,000, a new monthly record, per the Associated Press.
AP reported that ICE has increasingly relied on arrests in neighborhoods, traffic stops, and partnerships with local law enforcement, a shift away from the larger citywide operations seen earlier in the year. According to internal guidance, ICE has set specific training and equipment requirements that officers must meet before they can conduct vehicle stops.
The rise in arrests has increased pressure on detention space. DHS has solicited private companies to build three types of temporary facilities — one for court hearings, one for interviews and processing, and a field-detention unit — to reduce overcrowding at existing centers, according to a contract solicitation. The document described the need to expand “secure processing and holding” capacity and “non-detained hearing space on site” as urgent. “No new facility plans to announce at this time,” a DHS spokesperson said.
Reaching 19,000 arrests a week would push the annual pace well beyond even the record summer months. As of this writing, DHS maintains that officers are not working to a set target, while CNN and other outlets report that ICE leadership has instructed agents to raise daily arrests to 3,000.
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