Colorado immigration attorneys and advocates say the president’s tweet announcing the imminent deportation of millions of immigrants was more about fear-mongering and pandering to his base on the eve of the launch of his re-election campaign than a serious threat.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday night to announce what could be interpreted as a plan to remove undocumented immigrants from this country.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in,” Trump wrote.
Denver immigration attorney Michael McCarroll called it “just a bunch of chatter.” He said the federal government doesn’t have the resources to deport millions of immigrants or the judges to handle the cases, but the president succeeded in scaring people.
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If the president is worried that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have enough resources at the border, Casa de Paz director Sarah Jackson said she’s not sure how he expects agents to deport millions of people.
Casa de Paz works to reunite families separated by immigration detention in Aurora, and Jackson was one of the organizers who helped host asylum seekers in Denver temporarily as they were connected to their sponsors.
“I think that his tweet is kind of intended to pander to his base and eventually create this false hysteria and basically trying to direct attention back to himself rather than articulating a clear plan or policy direction,” Jackson said.
Except for during former President Barack Obama’s second term, McCarroll said ICE officers have always focused their deportation efforts on any undocumented immigrants, not just convicted criminals. Still, there’s a priority system, and immigrants who have committed crimes are going to remain the focus for deportation, McCaroll believes.
“It’s just maybe more aggressive action, but it’s pretty much business as usual,” he said.
Denver immigration attorney Catherine Chan said her office is working four times as hard on the same number of cases as in years past because everything just gets denied and the pushback on immigration has increased.
And the deportations are taking place faster, McCarroll said.
Chan shared the sentiment that Trump’s tweets often seem meant to instill fear in immigrants, rather than proposing tangible changes to a system that needs reform. Those changes, however, need to be made on a legislative level, she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is being cautious about how it interprets what the tweet means.
“I realize that the president often does do policy changes via tweets, but it’s not clear that this one is in that realm,” policy director Denise Maes said.
That doesn’t mean the ACLU isn’t paying attention — the organization just doesn’t want to contribute to unnecessary panic, Maes said.
“If it’s something random and unfounded and has legal implications, you bet we’ll be involved,” she said.
When Chan first saw the president’s tweet, she thought of the 2006 immigration raid at the Greeley meatpacking plant Swift and Co. However, Homeland Security doesn’t usually broadcast its raids ahead of time, she pointed out.
That doesn’t mean Chan believes it’s an empty threat.
“I don’t know why somebody would make a threat at that level unless there was something behind it,” she said. “The what remains to be seen.”
The idea of deporting millions of people — and quickly — is “laughable” to Chan. The only way to do that is to somehow find and deport only people who have been deported previously. Everyone else has to go through the legal court process and that often takes years.
“Overwhelmingly, immigrants are continually fearful immigration is going to come knocking on their door or workplace because of the way Trump talks about immigration,” said Victor Galvan, director of federal campaigns for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.
He doesn’t believe the administration can carry out its threat, but he also knows there’s been an uptick in detentions across the U.S. and even in Colorado, particularly Durango, he said.
“I really think that this is really to scare both people living here but also people who want to come here, asylum seekers and refugees,” Galvan said.
Galvan said his message to immigrant communities and their supporters is to stand strong and know their rights.
“People cannot be detained unless Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a valid judicially-reviewed warrant,” he said. “For those that find themselves with an immigration officer that does have a warrant, let those immigrants know they still have a right to a trial and an attorney.”
The system needs to be fixed, Galvan said, but the solution isn’t just to stop immigration.
“We need to focus on policy that actually creates safe ways for people to gain their citizenship and gain legal status in the United States,” he said.
The ICE office in Denver declined to comment, referring questions to the White House.
