President Donald Trump issued new orders as part of his plan to ramp up massive deportations of illegal migrants – a daily quota of arrests for border officials.
In a Saturday phone call with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, Trump staff said the president was unhappy with the number of arrests so far.
He wants it ramped up from a few hundred a day to 1,200 to 1,500 per day, the Washington Post reported.
ICE officials were told that each field office should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable when that number isn’t reached.
White House communications director Steven Cheung called the quota story ‘fake news’ but didn’t elaborate.
The news of the quota requirement has sparked criticism from those concerned officials will partake in more indiscriminate arrests, or face charges of civil rights violations as they try to meet their numbers.
Trump campaigned on strengthening the U.S. border and cracking down on illegal immigration.
He has already started – a nationwide crackdown on Sunday resulted in the arrest of 956 people.
‘We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out,’ the president told DailyMail.com on Friday.
‘These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen. We’re taking them out first.’
And his administration is just getting started.
Already Trump has sent troops to the border and signed multiple executive orders empowering his administration to crack down on migrants.
The president also got into a temporary tariff war on Sunday with Colombia after that country’s president, Gustavo Petro, prevented two U.S. military aircraft full of their citizens from landing amid the U.S.’ mass deportation effort.
Trump threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on Colombian imports, which he rescinded once Colombia backed down and allowed the planes to land.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said on Sunday the number of arrests will increase.
‘You’re going to see the numbers steadily increase, the number of arrests nationwide,’ he told ABC’s This Week.
‘Right now, it’s concentrating on public safety threats, national security threats. That’s a smaller population. So we’re going to do this on priority base, that’s President Trump’s promise. But as that aperture opens, there’ll be more arrests nationwide.’
And he told NBC News the goal is to ‘get as many criminals as possible.’
‘I don’t have a quota,’ he said. ‘My instructions to them: Arrest as many as you can.’
Chicago was one of the city’s where officials made mass arrests over the weekend.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat who is seen as a possible 2028 presidential contender, raised concerns.
He told CNN on Sunday that he found it ‘disturbing’ that officials indicated they would be targeting ‘law-abiding’ residents as well, those ‘who are holding down jobs, who have families here, who may have been here for a decade or two decades, and they’re often our neighbors and our friends’.
‘Why are we going after them?’ he said. ‘These are not people who are causing problems in our country, and what we need is a path to citizenship for them.’
‘We need to secure our border. We need to get rid of the violent criminals, but we also need to protect people, at least the residents of Illinois and all across the nation who are just doing what we hope that immigrants will do,’ he said.
Pritzkler said he was given no advance notice of the raids and that local Chicago PD were not involved.
The Trump administration enlisted various law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department — the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals — to assist operations in Chicago and other cities.