Roundup Wound Up

Don't know if this was connected to the raids or not.

Trump's ICE roundups seem to have ended up more Ruritania than Third Reich, as our valiant anti-immigrant paramilitary couldn't find anybody to arrest, at least in New York City, per NPR:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Saturday that ICE officers had already attempted to make arrests in the city, but they were not successful.

Activists have been spreading the word to migrants to not open their doors if an immigration agent knocks, since they cannot use force to enter a residence.

While across the river, The Times reported,

A teenager who lives with her parents in Passaic, N.J., said she was awakened at about 1 a.m. Sunday by a knock on the door from people she believed to be ICE agents. Having seen numerous “know your rights” posts on Instagram, she knew not to open it.

“They said, ‘We need to talk to you, can you come outside, can you open the door?’ I said, ‘Do you have permission to come inside my house, do you have a paper?’” she recounted. “They said, ‘We’re not trying to come inside your house, we just want to speak with you.’ And I said, ‘No I’m not coming outside.”

After some persistence, she said, the door-knockers left. But at 5 a.m., more arrived, now surrounding the house with flashlights and banging on the door and window. Liza ran upstairs to be with her parents, and they hid with the lights off. She said she was “too scared to look outside,” and was unable to see any uniforms the people may have been wearing. Eventually they left again.

Or maybe no raids took place at all, according to USA Today:

The president said the raids would start Sunday, leading many to worry that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would follow their usual procedure of conducting predawn raids to round up immigrants.

But as the hours passed Sunday, immigration attorneys and advocates around the country said they had not heard any reports of unusual ICE activity. The president said the raids will primarily target immigrants with criminal convictions or those previously ordered deported.

Who knows? Did Trump inadvertently sabotage his own operation by giving the "criminals" two days' advance notice? Or advertently, given that his henchmen must have repeatedly told him not to do it? Or did ICE simply cancel the whole thing once again, as they did in June?

Trump supposedly canceled the June raids himself, out of a magnanimous desire to give the Democrats in the House another chance to rewrite asylum law, which of course they were not going to do; or maybe that's just what the henchmen told him he was doing when they canceled them because Trump's leaking of the date had guaranteed they'd fail?

I don't know if anybody's grasped how confused the plans seemed to be, starting with who the agency was planning to arrest. Some ICE officials had announced that it was targeting families with outstanding deportation orders—

A small number of coordinated federal raids targeting undocumented migrant parents and their children took place over the weekend, the beginning of the Trump administration’s plan to swiftly enforce deportation orders against some 2,000 recently arrived migrants who are not eligible to remain in the country.

—while others said family members would not be picked up:

A law enforcement official briefed on the operation told ABC News agents would target only undocumented immigrants with final removal orders, who would be arrested and in most cases deported.

The same official said the operation will not arrest so-called "collaterals," those people who happen to be with the targeted individual. The official described this operation as a consolidated effort of something ICE does all the time.

But the president hadn't gotten either memo:

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted upcoming immigration raids set to begin this weekend will focus primarily on deporting criminals though he acknowledged his administration will target anyone who entered the country illegally.

“We’re really looking for criminals as much as we can. Trying to find the criminal population, which has been coming into this country the last 10 years,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to depart Washington. He touted his administration’s removal of members of the violent gang MS-13, claiming he’d deported them “by the thousands.”

Incidentally, ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations claim that in 2018 they "removed nearly 6,000 gang members, including 1,332 MS-13 members – a 24-percent increase from FY 2017." But their ability to identify gang members is notoriously error-prone and often hard to distinguish from pure ethnic profiling, especially in immigration court:

according to a CityLab report, gang databases maintained by states and ICE are often “riddled with error.” The report pointed to California’s CalGang database as an example, which has been shown to include “unfounded entries” and “hundreds of names that should have been purged years ago.” Many juveniles were added to this database without being notified, and some of the information in these databases may be violating individuals’ privacy rights, the report states. The New Yorker reported that “ICE identifies someone as a gangster if he meets at least two criteria from a long list that includes ‘having gang tattoos,’ ‘frequenting an area notorious for gangs,’ and ‘wearing gang apparel.’” And The Intercept wrote that “gang documentation is a unilateral designation by law enforcement and is extremely difficult to challenge in criminal court. . . Challenging gang classification by law enforcement is more difficult during deportation proceedings because defendants cannot compel the government to disclose the evidence against them as they can in criminal court.”...

The New Yorker reported that because of ICE’s “nebulous indicators,” a teenager in Long Island, NY, was put in deportation proceedings for reasons including that he wore a Brooklyn Nets hat and allegedly performed “a gang handshake.” The third reason was his girlfriend: a 16-year-old U.S. citizen who had been kidnapped by a previous boyfriend after she ended their relationship when she found out he was an MS-13 member. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has argued that the tactic of “using unsubstantiated claims of gang affiliation to illegally detain teenagers” encourages profiling of Latinos, and the organization has filed a lawsuit alleging that federal immigration authorities were “wrongfully arresting Latino teens in New York” based on unfounded gang-related charges.

My first thought from the original announcement in June

“Countless illegal aliens not only violate our borders but then break the law all over again by skipping their court hearings and absconding from federal proceedings. These runaway aliens lodge phony asylum claims only to be no-shows at court and are ordered removed in absentia,” the official told ABC News.

“There are more than 1 million illegal aliens who have been issued final deportation orders by federal judges yet remain at large in the country. These judicial removal orders were secured at great time and expense, and yet illegal aliens not only refuse to appear in court, they often obtain fraudulent identities, collect federal welfare, and illegally work in the United States.” 

(the anguished tone suggest Stephen Miller) was that they might be making a bona fide effort to focus on people who really "deserve" deporting or at least have been judged that way by the proper authorities, though that's often wrong too

Some immigrants do not receive notices at all. Perhaps the mail just doesn’t arrive. Perhaps the immigrant has updated his address with the court, as required by law, but the change never got into the system. Perhaps a Customs and Border Patrol officer simply entered the information incorrectly. Perhaps the court sends notice to a wrong or incomplete address and the overburdened judge hearing her 38th status hearing that morning does not notice. Yes, it is also possible that the immigrant gave the wrong information. Although I have never seen that, it probably happens from time to time.

which would explain why the agents can't ever find anybody they're looking for and end up arresting people who shouldn't be deported at all (including US citizens).

But I'm pretty sure at this point that it's mainly another example of government by tweet: where the agency finds out from Twitter that the emperor wants something, and tries to figure out what it is, and in the best of cases tries to think of a way of using the order to accomplish something or at least do no harm, but mainly to rescue themselves from getting bellowed at.

Cooch (former lieutenant governor of Virginia and scourge of bare-breasted statuary, now Trump's acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services) trying not to explain why he doesn't have a clue now about something that was perfectly clear to him just a few days ago:

"I told you, I don't have details about any arrests that have taken place so far with respect to that operation," Cuccinelli said.

Last week, however, Cuccinelli indicated to reporters at the White House that he was familiar with the operation.

"They're absolutely going to happen," he said then. "There's approximately a million people in this country with removal orders. And of course that isn't what ICE will go after in this, but that's the pool of people who have been all the way through the due process chain."

I'll tell you this, there's a chance an operation like this really won't do any harm, out of sheer ineptness, but it's a hell of a way to run a railroad.