In Minneapolis, 700 ICE agents are being immediately redeployed but agency officials are not saying whether they will come back to Chicago, or where they might go.
When it comes to immigration enforcement, Wednesday’s ICE messaging made it clear: the tone and the marching orders come from the top, from the desk of President Donald Trump.
He told NBC News on Wednesday that he gave the command to cut back ICE agents in Minneapolis and now the president says perhaps a softer touch is warranted.
“Crime in all cities is down. And you know why it’s down? It’s down because of us,” the president said. “It’s down in Chicago by 25% despite the fact that we’re always dealing with these people-they happen to be Democrats-who don’t know anything about crime prevention…”
Trump spoke in an exclusive interview Wednesday with NBC’s Tom Llamas, repeating a favorite charge against Chicago leaders, but he’s actually now understating the crime reduction in the city. Last year murders were down 29% and there was about a 35% drop in shootings and robberies.
And so in Chicago and in Minneapolis, the president is now suggesting there should be a different approach.
“Maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch,” Trump told Llamas. “But, you still have to be tough…we’re dealing with really hard criminals.”
With that Trump says he ordered Border Czar Tom Homan to reduce the Minneapolis immigration deployment by 750 officers.
“We have an unprecedented number of counties allowing ICE to take custody of illegal aliens before they hit the streets!” Homan said at a Wednesday morning news conference in Minneapolis. “More officers taking custody of criminal aliens directly from the jails, means less officers on the street doing criminal operations.”
But problems remain. Despite most Minnesota jails and prisons now turning over criminal immigrants to ICE, more than one hundred behind bars remain untouchable by ICE because the agency hasn’t obtained required judicial detainers.
“We have some of these people who simply don’t have criminal history, and it does not make sense that they would fall on this ‘worst of the worst list,’” said Paul Schnell, commissioner of the Minnesota Dept. Of Corrections. “That’s the part that becomes confusing and I think troubling for most Minnesotans.”
There are also other problems to clean-up. In Denver, playing cards emblazoned by ICE were left on the vehicles of detainees. The Ace of Spades is a symbol used by some white supremacists, and is also reminiscent of death cards U.S. soldiers put on Vietcong bodies during the Vietnam War.
Homeland Security officials say they condemn the behavior and that ICE supervisors addressed it but some members of Congress say they want a deeper investigation.
Homan says he and President Trump have a goal of removing all 2,300 additional ICE agents from Minneapolis and end the surge there, an operation that DHS revealed Wednesday has yielded 4,000 arrests.
They wouldn’t say how many had pending criminal charges.
