New Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have rolled out across Southern California, roiling state officials and triggering rumors of broader actions. But though the Trump administration has focused on expanding the scope and strength of enforcement, the current raids trace back to planning conducted at the tail end of President Obama’s term in office. 

“Immigration arrests across Southern California over the past week were planned before President Trump took office and could be compared to similar operations the occurred last summer, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said,” Fox News noted. “A decade ago, immigration officers searching for specific individuals would often arrest others found along the way, a practice that drew criticism from advocates. Under the Obama administration, agents also carried out arrests but focused more narrowly on specific individuals.”

Political pushback

But while California Democrats have felt more uncertainty and anxiety around immigration in the early days of the Trump administration, they have also felt a greater latitude to object to federal enforcement. “Democrats have complained about getting little or conflicting information about who was targeted in the raids that have panicked many in the immigrant community,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Democrats in Congress say Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told them Thursday the agency plans to employ a broader brush in making immigration arrests, armed with a new executive order from President Trump. Democrats and Republicans in House leadership met in a closed-door meeting with Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan to talk about last week’s immigration raids in Los Angeles and other cities, which netted nearly 700 people across the country last week.”

Fraught nerves have spread throughout areas of the state where support for so-called sanctuary cities, and opposition to the new administration, is high. “Rumors that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up undocumented residents throughout the Bay Area are just that — rumors, according to a spokesman for the federal agency,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. “One of those rumors resulted in an ‘urgent notification’ Tuesday to parents of students at a charter school in San Jose, said James Schwab, a spokesman for the federal agency. Similar rumors have circulated in El Cerrito, Oakland, Richmond and San Pablo. All of them have been false, Schwab said.”

Continuity and change

But confusion has persisted, and not only in California, over exactly how ICE has altered its approach to the current round of enforcement. “Under Obama, ICE agents mainly picked up what they called criminal aliens from jails around the country. But with this operation, you’re seeing these immigration agents fanning out into streets and neighborhoods,” John Burnett reported from Texas on NPR. “And that’s what left people so alarmed. I spoke with the Mexican consul here in Austin, Carlos Gonzalez, earlier today. The numbers he gave me was he says 49 Mexican nationals were picked up Thursday, Friday and today. He said that’s a significant increase over the usual apprehensions of undocumenteds here in Austin. And, of course, that doesn’t even include Central Americans or other nationalities that would’ve been picked up.”

The Obama administration’s official trigger for action, a so-called “threat to the community,” was not always applied by ICE this time around. Jorge-Mario Cabrera, communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, told LA Weekly that an unofficial “sense of respect for families and immigrants” was “not always respected” by the previous administration, but did color its approach to enforcement and deportation. ICE senior spokeswoman Virginia C. Kice, told the paper the current actions were consistent with past practices. “Kice points to a series of targeted enforcement actions taken under the Obama administration in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2015, which netted 10 to nearly 20 times as many arrests as occurred last week,” the Weekly noted. 

“California issued more than a half-million driver’s licenses under a new law granting the identifying documents to immigrants who may be in the country illegally,” the Associated Press noted. “The Department of Motor Vehicles announced Wednesday that 605,000 licenses were issued since AB60 took effect last January. That’s out of 830,000 applications.”

The Orange County Register reported that reaching and processing that group would cost an estimated $141 million spread over three years. “Seniors were particularly hard hit because anyone over 70 has to appear in person at a DMV office to have a license renewed,” according to the Register. But 76-year-old Kent Moore told the Register that he had “mixed feelings” about spending hours at the Costa Mesa DMV despite holding an appointment. “These folks have jobs. And they support families. If they go through the credential process, they shouldn’t be denied,” he said. “But I paid my dues. I’ve been a model citizen. I don’t feel I should have to wait in line for hours, behind newly arrived people who are here illegally.”

No residency permits

Although opposition to the licensing plan has been steady, it has not produced a groundswell strong enough to roll back the problem. But a proposed initiative that would have ushered in a residence permit system for those who unlawfully entered and remained in the state failed to collect enough signatures to meet the requirements for inclusion on the ballot this election year. The so-called California Immigration Reform Act “would also have created a new state department to administer the permit system, require permit holders to pay state income taxes and make permit holders eligible for certain public benefits,” MyNewsLA noted. “The initiative would also have prohibited state and local governments from using public funds to support or otherwise participate in federal immigration enforcement against permit holders.”

Immigration has remained a sharply divisive issue, with state officials seeking to pursue an accommodating course while many residents remain on edge. Late last month, the Golden State was virtually alone in responding favorably to the federal government’s request for help in housing immigrant children on their own. “California and Virginia told the National Guard Bureau they have facilities that could be used but they would require additional funding if asked to meet federal requirements,” according to the Associated Press. California Guard spokesman Brandon Honig told the AP that “all state facilities would require work for fencing or other items to meet the requirements.”

Raid fears

But this month, passions have run high amid a spate of federal immigration raids both real and imagined. In events that sent tremors through California politics, “Democrats, led by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, have protested a number of raids carried out in southern states by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers against illegal immigrants from Central America — 121 adults and children who had been ordered to leave the country by a judge,” ABC News reported. “Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, who has been in constant communication with White House officials and attended the Tuesday meeting with the White House council, said she was not aware of any imminent ‘pause’ to the operations.” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had predicted a reprieve, although he couldn’t speak to when the White House might announce it, according to The Hill.

Rumors quickly caught fire in California that deportation raids were underway on the west coast too. As Fusion noted, “there were multiple reports of immigration officials lingering in front of a San Francisco elementary school. Tweets, Facebook updates, and even Instagram posts reported immigration checkpoints at grocery stores all over the Bay Area. There were also reports of immigration agents rounding up day laborers at a Home Depot in Hayward. But all of the reports turned out to be false, according to immigration officials and other social media users who went looking for the raids with the intent to share pictures and video.”

After forming quick — some say stealthy — plans to hand California some 300 undocumented immigrants detained in Texas, the federal government has reversed that decision, only to leave open the prospect of changing it back yet again.

The uncertainty underscores a surprising level of unpreparedness for the kind of illegal immigration now dominating headlines, which includes especially high numbers of children. Complicating the bureaucratic problem even further, many of the children are unaccompanied.

In recent years, illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have been on a historic downturn, with border apprehensions at or near all-time lows. Unauthorized child immigrants, however, began increasing in number three years ago. As USA Today reports, federal authorities now say that since October 2013, over 52,000 children have been caught in illegal border crossings; prior to 2011, that figure stood at just 7,000 a year.

Notably, the number of apprehended children excludes those who crossed the border accompanied by parents or other adults (and, of course, those who haven’t been caught, whether because their journey was successful or ended in death). Since the October surge, authorities have snared over 39,000 adults with young children. As the Washington Post reports, some among that group have been released, but the Department of Homeland Security won’t give any detailed statistics — or even reveal whether any among that number simply failed to appear in immigration court.

California blowback

Circumstances are cloudy surrounding the Border Patrol’s plans to transfer to California the 300 detainees, most of whom are families with children. Described by Customs and Border Protection spokesman Ralph DeSio as a “thing” in a “very fluid state,” federal decision-making appeared to change in the face of local opposition to the flight scheme in the San Diego area.

Although only a small group of no more than a few dozen citizens turned out for a Temecula protest decrying the transfer plan, they earlier found an audience in Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona. After meeting with the protestors last week, Calvert released a statement echoing their concerns. He said, “It is simply outrageous and completely irresponsible for the Obama administration to transport illegal immigrants to facilities, like the Murrieta Border Patrol Station, that are not equipped or prepared to handle them.” 

The Murrieta station seems to have been considered specifically as part of the Border Patrol’s search for accommodations adequate to detain families with children. Part of the confusion stems from the complex of bureaucratic authorities involved in such a process. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, chooses which families are detained and which are released — not Customs and Border Protection.

Federal follies

Yet ICE only counts among its physical assets one detention center designed for families, according to The Washington Post. Boasting just 85 beds, it is located in Pennsylvania, far from the U.S.-Mexico border.

A family-specific detention center over seven times that size is in the works at an Artesia, New Mexico location. But the Post reports that Rep. Steve Pearce, R-New Mexico, has revealed even this location would not be able to house unaccompanied minors.

In a clumsy move that drew howls from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, border agents flew some 400 families with children detained in Texas to Tucson, where ICE took them into custody. But ICE officials then ran busloads of detained families to the Tucson Greyhound station — switching to the bus line’s Phoenix station only when the Tucson location had been overrun with the would-be immigrants, who had not been given any food or child care supplies.

“State and local governments, law enforcement agencies, health care providers and nonprofit organizations are all stretched to the breaking point attempting to manage the enormity of these challenges,” Brewer wrote, in a fiercely-worded letter to President Barack Obama.

On Thursday, the Miami Herald reported on the fury in some communities over the surge in deportations under the Obama administration.

Among the most important points in the report, titled Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2011, ICE detained a record 429,000 foreigners without documentation, and expelled about 188,000 immigrants with criminal records — another unprecedented number.

The report confirms numbers available separately at the ICE’s website, which shows that in 2011 the agency deported a record number of foreigners without documents: 396,906, most of them with criminal records.

According to the same ICE numbers, almost 2 million undocumented immigrants were deported between 2007 and last year. Initially, most of those deported were immigrants who simply did not have papers. Gradually, the priority shifted to immigrants with criminal records or who had been deported previously and had returned. In 2011, 55 percent of those deported had criminal records. On the other hand, the detentions of undocumented foreigners have not stopped, though the number of immigrants who simply have no papers seems to be diminishing.

The accelerated pace of detentions and deportations under the Obama administration has outraged immigration activists …

Incredibly, Thursday night in a Univision interview, the president blamed Congress:

“As the head of the executive branch, there’s a limit to what I can do,” he said. “Part of the reasons that deportations went up was Congress put a whole lot of money into it and when you have a lot of resources and a lot more agents involved, then there are going to be higher numbers.”

And asked if his action to stop deporting some people in the country illegally — announced in June, as the campaign was heating up — was done purely for political purposes, Obama pivoted to focus the conversation on the Republicans’ immigration proposals.

Journalists, with some accuracy, point out the failings of Mitt Romney as a candidate. Barack Obama has had three ridiculous screw-ups this summer — “The private sector is doing fine”; “You didn’t build that”; and now this 100 percent deportation lie.

When will he get the klutz title he deserves?

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Oh, right, never. The mainstream media aren’t allowed to note what a rotten president and overrated politcian that Obama is, even as Bob Woodward and The New York Times make broad hints that that is the case.