Trump says immigrant deportations focus on criminals. But is that true?

Andres Oppenheimer

What irony! President Trump is reportedly detaining undocumented immigrants with no criminal records who do jobs that Americans don’t want to do, while freeing violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and in many cases were convicted for destroying government property and injuring police officers.

I know, Trump says his promised “largest deportation program in America’s history” is focused on undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes. That’s fine with most Americans, and with me. Any country has the right to deport unauthorized foreigners who are dangerous criminals.

But, while Trump administration officials are highlighting the arrests of undocumented criminals, the latest news suggests that many of those detained are restaurant workers, house cleaners and others who have committed no criminal offenses.

Being an undocumented immigrant is a civil offense, not a crime, unless the person had earlier been deported and re-entered the United States illegally, immigration lawyers say.

On Sunday’s nationwide immigration raids, immigration agents detained 613 people with criminal records, and 566 with no criminal histories, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal reported.

Take the case of the Jan. 23 immigration raid at Ocean Seafood Depot, a seafood market in Newark, New Jersey, where workers clean and sell shellfish. A witness who spoke to Telemundo’s TV station there said armed immigration officers entered the small business and arrested three long-time workers.

“None of these people were rapists or murderers or criminals,” Newark mayor Ras Baraka said later. In a statement, Baraka also accused ICE of detaining both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens.

One of the detainees was a U.S. military veteran “who suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned,” Baraka added.

The response by the Trump administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials seems to be that detentions of undocumented people who have not committed serious crimes is “collateral damage” in the process of arresting criminals.

In a statement about the Newark raid, ICE said that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may encounter U.S. citizens while conducting field work and may request identification to establish an individual’s identity.”

You don’t have to be an expert to speculate that detentions of undocumented factory workers, restaurant dishwashers, house cleaners, nannies and gardeners will increase in coming months.

Trump has said he wants to deport most of the estimated 11 to 13 million unauthorized immigrants, but only up to 650,000 of them are estimated to have criminal records. As criminals become harder to find, where do you think Trump will find more potential deportation subjects, if not among those who aren’t criminals?

The process of casting a wider net to catch undocumented immigrants may have already begun. Over the past weekend, the administration implemented new daily arrest targets for immigration officers, The Washington Post reported.

Under the new arrest quotas, ICE’s offices will now have to meet a target of 75 arrests a day per office, or about 1,000 to 1,500 nationwide.

“The orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics” to meet their quotas, the newspaper quoted current and former ICE officials as saying.

One can only wonder whether Trump’s “national emergency” over the “invasion” of undocumented people is not a distraction to make us forget that he had promised to curb inflation shortly, and to end the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency, if not before.

In fact, the flow of undocumented migrants fell by more than 70% in the last months of 2024, after a post-pandemic surge in 2022 and 2023, according to Border Patrol figures.

The U.S. economy needs more — not fewer — immigrants. In part because of declining U.S. birth rates, there are 8 million job openings in America, but only 6.8 million unemployed workers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Without immigrants, labor costs will rise, and so will inflation.

The bottom line is that it’s OK to deport foreign criminals, and there’s no question that America needs to fix its immigration system. But detaining people who clean shrimp at a Newark seafood market while freeing Jan. 6 violent rioters is not only morally questionable, but economically insane.