WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has arrested hundreds of illegal aliens in cities that are hostile to the federal government's deportation crackdown, the latest salvo in the battle over so-called sanctuary cities.
Federal officials said Thursday that "Operation Safe City" specifically targeted some of the fiercest opponents of President Donald Trump's immigration policies, including New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Washington.
In all, 498 aliens, including 28 in Baltimore and 14 in the District of Columbia, were taken into custody in a four-day operation that ended Wednesday, officials said. Just under two-thirds of those arrested had criminal records in the United States.
"We are never going to stop enforcing the laws that we're authorized and required to do," said Matthew Albence, an executive associate director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "If we need to go into these locations every week, we will go into these locations every week to remove these public-safety threats."
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The administration for months has attempted to penalize jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal deportation efforts, but it has been met with resistance. Federal courts have largely blocked Trump's executive order in January that threatened to strip federal grant money from such cities and towns.
Hundreds of jurisdictions restrict how much their officials can cooperate with immigration agents. Some limit their access to jails or refuse to provide federal authorities with information about immigrants arrested for local crimes.
Administration officials say these cities shield criminals from deportation. But advocates for immigrants say police responsibilities do not include enforcing civil immigration laws and warn that doing so makes otherwise law-abiding immigrants less likely to report crimes.
"These raids are simply another attempt by the president and his anti-immigrant chiefs to bully cities into undermining the constitutional protections of all [their] residents, irrespective of their immigration status," said U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
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Despite the administration's stepped-up arrest efforts, the latest data show that the number of deportations has fallen over the past 12 months.
Trump took office pledging to round up as many as 3 million drug dealers, gang members and other criminals he said were living in the United States illegally. But the most recent figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicate the government may be having a hard time finding enough eligible "bad hombres," as the president described them, to quickly meet those targets.
As of Sept. 9, three weeks before the end of fiscal 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported 211,068 immigrants, according to the most recent figures provided by the agency, compared with 240,255 people removed during fiscal 2016.
The lower totals are not for lack of effort. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, its agents have made 43 percent more arrests since Trump took office compared with the same period last year.
While the agency took into custody more immigrants with criminal records, the fastest-growing category of arrests since Trump's inauguration are those facing no criminal charges. The agency arrested more than 28,000 "non-criminal immigration violators" between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, according to the agency's records, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.
"[The agency] has taken the gloves off, and they are going after whoever they want and for whatever reason," said Ray Ybarra Maldonado, an immigration attorney in Phoenix. "It's a free-for-all now."
There appear to be several factors that explain why deportations have declined despite the increase in arrests, according to policy experts, immigration attorneys and current and former agency officials.
The number of people attempting to sneak across the U.S. border with Mexico fell dramatically in the months after Trump's inauguration, reducing the supply of easy-to-deport immigrants. And while the administration has directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ramp up enforcement, antipathy toward the president's policies has supercharged the fundraising ability of advocacy groups and pro-bono law firms that help immigrants fight deportation.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said Trump "is keeping his promise to the American people to secure the border, deport illegal immigrants, and fix an immigration system that has long been broken."
Asked to comment on this year's lower deportation numbers, Smith blamed "sanctuary" policies and advocacy groups for holding Immigration and Customs Enforcement back.
"At every turn illegal immigration activists sue the administration and cooperating local law enforcement to stop increased enforcement efforts," he said in a statement.
A Section on 09/29/2017