9/20/2018

CRIME/ICE/IMMIGRATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “A daughter who never returned home, a son gunned down point-blank, a mom who was brutally attacked — all deaths at the hands of immigrants in the country illegally, all gripping stories the White House has been eager to share. But for all the talk of murderers, rapists and other ‘bad hombres,’ those netted in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration are typically accused of lesser offenses, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are increasingly apprehending those with no criminal records at all…The case of Mollie Tibbetts — a 20-year-old Iowa college student authorities say was killed by a man living in the U.S. illegally — is among the latest used by Trump to advance his argument for stricter immigration controls. Yet the government’s own statistics show such cases are far more likely to be the exception than the rule. ICE arrests of noncriminals increased 66 percent in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year over the same period a year earlier. Arrests of convicts, meantime, rose nearly 2 percent. More noncriminals have also been deported. Among those expelled from the U.S. interior in fiscal 2017, there was a 174 percent increase from the previous year of those with no criminal convictions. Deportations of those with convictions rose nearly 13 percent over the same period.”

The Associated Press, “Trump’s Immigrant Roundups Increasingly Net Noncriminals,” The New York Times online, September 20, 2018