Throughout the 2024 presidential race, candidate Donald Trump didn’t just vow a mass deportation campaign, the Republican also assured voters that the effort was necessary to remove violent immigrants who’ve committed heinous crimes from American soil.
Voters who believed the pitch should now realize that what they were promised isn’t what they’re receiving. The New York Times reported:
A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. They included people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.
A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were people who were accused of violating civil immigration laws but who had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of newly released federal data shows. The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.
On the anniversary of his second inauguration, the president wrote online that he wanted his administration to focus more on “talking about the murderers and other criminals” that “the Department of Homeland Security and ICE … are capturing and taking out of the system.”
In the days that followed, Trump echoed the talking point obsessively, insisting at a Mar-a-Lago event that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are “taking out murderers, they’re taking out drug lords, they’re taking out people from mental institutions. … They’re taking out the roughest people.” Around the same time, at a North Carolina event, the president similarly boasted, “We’re really focused on the bad people,” arresting “murderers, the drug dealers, the ones from prison.”
In February, Trump assured reporters, “We’re focusing on the criminals, the killers.” A few days earlier, in an NBC News interview, the president added, “We are totally focused on criminals, really bad criminals. … I’m talking about murderers from different countries.”
Congressional Republicans, taking their rhetorical cues from the White House, have tried to stick to the script. House Republican Whip Tom Emmer appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference earlier this year and, in apparent reference to immigrants being targeted by the administration, began his remarks by saying, “Pedophiles. Rapists. Murderers.”
The Minnesota Republican similarly held up a photo of a suspect, under an all-caps headline that read, “Worst of the worst.”
The four-word phrase was familiar, in large part because it’s the phrase Trump has repeated countless times in recent years to emphasize who exactly would be targeted by federal immigration agents.
Except, thanks to the administration’s own data, we now know better. Federal immigration agents aren’t “totally focused on … really bad criminals”; more than 96% of the immigrants arrested last month had never been convicted of a violent crime.
Indeed, as 5-year-old Liam Tadeo and his father, Victor Martinez Nieto, are deported to Mexico, it’s worth emphasizing that research conducted by MS NOW and The Marshall Project shows that at least 500 babies and toddlers have been detained by ICE during Trump’s second term.
It’s something to keep in mind the next time administration officials or congressional Republicans reference the “worst of the worst.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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