Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers continue to expand their actions to nab illegal aliens nationwide, with recent raids taking place across Greater Boston and Washington, DC.
Local NBC affiliate WRC-TV accompanied a group — including personnel from across ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — on a raid in Hagerstown, Maryland, this week.
“According to ICE, all the targets on this day had final orders for removal, meaning an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. They used what is called administrative warrants to make the arrests,” WRC-TV reported.
“If we’re unable to arrest them in a public area, we’ll try to get a criminal warrant from the U.S. attorney’s office so we can break the door down,” Maryland ICE Director Matt Elliston told the affiliate.
ICE has encountered fewer hangups when enacting their mission under the latest administration of President Donald Trump, Ellison noted. The agency is now empowered to conduct what are known as “collateral arrests,” or detentions of additional illegal aliens they encounter while apprehending targeted illegals. Such arrests were banned under the administration of former President Joe Biden.
“We’re still targeting that worst of the worst person, you know, except now if we come across someone who’s standing next to him, who’s also here illegally, we’re going to take that person too,” he said.
“All we do is targeted enforcement,” Ellison added. “We use intelligence-driven leads. We know the targets that we’re going after. We don’t do dragnets. We don’t go door to door. That’s never something that ICE has done.”
And in Boston, ICE officers were seen carrying out raids in the suburbs of Everett and Chelsea this week.
ICE’s enforcement of collateral arrests across Chicago in January was recently met with blowback when pro-immigration activists and lawyers alleged in a federal complaint filed last week that such actions “violate[d] a 2022 agreement between Chicago groups and the federal government detailing how U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement officers can make ‘collateral arrests,'” the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) filed the complaint “on behalf of advocacy groups in Chicago. Among other things, the agreement says ICE agents can make a warrantless arrest only when they have evidence that an individual is likely to escape,” according to the report.
NIJC and other activist groups are demanding the release of “two people who remain detained, sanctions against arresting officers and more transparency in how the agency conducts its operations, among other things,” the AP noted.
In an opposing action, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) moved on March 14 to dismiss a Biden-era suit challenging an Iowa law which declares it a crime to return to the state after being deported or denied entry to the U.S., the New York Times reported.
“A similar filing on Friday sought the dismissal of a Justice Department challenge to an Oklahoma immigration law that had also been blocked,” the newspaper noted.
And in Texas, Trump’s DOJ this week withdrew another comparable Biden-era challenge to a state law that “would allow state authorities to detain and remove people who come into the country illegally,” Bloomberg reported.
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