A massive liberal organization filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to understand how the agency could be utilized for President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement goals.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the agency on Monday in an effort to obtain information about ICE Air Operations, the network of chartered flights used to repatriate thousands of illegal migrants every year after they’ve been ordered deported. The ACLU says it aims for the findings to shed light on how ICE Air Operations could be expanded to carry out Trump’s pledge for mass deportations upon entering office.
The lawsuit pertains to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request the organization submitted in August asking for details about ICE Air. However, the ACLU says it filed its lawsuit after ICE failed to respond to their request.
“Little is known about how President-elect Trump would carry out its mass deportation agenda, but what we do know is that this proposal has already instilled fear among immigrant communities,” Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights at ACLU SoCal, said in a statement. “The public has a right to know how its taxpayer dollars could be used to fund deportation flights that would tear apart not only families, but also our communities.”
Before winning in an electoral landslide against Vice President Kamala Harris on Election Day, then-candidate Trump had been clear about his immigration enforcement platform on the campaign trail.
Trump pledged to continue building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, revive the Remain in Mexico program, hire more border patrol agents and put an end to birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents. Notably, he has also vowed to embark on the “largest deportation program in American history.”
The president-elect doubled down on this goal early Monday morning by confirming reports that he plans to declare a national emergency and use military assets to help carry out his mass deportation agenda.
The ACLU is no stranger to the incoming GOP administration. The liberal organization filed more than 400 legal actions against Trump and his first administration since 2016, with a large portion targeting immigration directives — and the group has vowed to go to court again once Trump resumes office.
The Monday lawsuit asks for the following: ICE contracts and records involving air transportation to carry out deportations, information on ground transportation used to transfer illegal migrants to airports for deportation, information on airfields used by ICE for deportation and guidance on ICE policies for staging illegal migrants and others for deportation flights.
With an estimated 17 million individuals living unlawfully in the U.S., it’s not immediately clear how the Trump administration will carry out such a massive deportation effort, but former ICE acting director Tom Homan — who Trump tapped to serve as border czar under his administration — has called for a targeted approach that prioritizes national security threats and those with other criminal histories.
Available data does show that deportations were considerably higher during Trump’s first term compared to the Biden-Harris administration.
There were a total of 273, 708 removals of illegal migrants during the first three fiscal years of the Biden-Harris administration, which included removals from ICE officers and other federal immigration agents, according to data compiled by the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE). This number marked a considerable drop from the 749,462 removals that took place during the first three fiscal years under Trump’s first term.
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