'We Are Turning the Clock Back'
Luis Gutiérrez has seen this before.
The unannounced raids. Reports that federal agents had detained immigrants who posed no threat, who had committed no crime, whose children were Americans citizens, who were not targets of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A sense of confusion and panic throughout the community of immigration lawyers and activists wondering just what was going on, who was safe and who was not.
The arrest by ICE officials last week of more than 680 immigrants across the country has angered Democrats and advocates who fear that they represent the deployment of the “deportation force” that President Trump once promised as a candidate. But the raids are also familiar—they were a regular feature in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
“If the question is, did this occur under Obama’s watch? The answer is absolutely yes,” Gutiérrez, the Illinois Democratic congressman and a longtime advocate of immigration reform, told me in a phone interview on Thursday morning. “But the next question we must ask: Did they cease to exist? The answer is absolutely yes.”
Gutiérrez and his allies in Congress and across the country are demanding answers from the Trump administration about last week’s raids. The overriding questions: Are these actions the result of a new policy setting broader priorities for deportation? Or is this merely the continuation of ICE’s mission under any president, Democrat or Republican, to enforce immigration laws and target, in particular, individuals who have committed crimes beyond their illegal entry into the United States?
Trump administration officials have said the raids were nothing new. John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, that more than 75 percent of those apprehended were convicted criminals. “ICE conducts these kind of targeted enforcement operations regularly
