The detention and deportation of immigrants isn’t a new issue in the United States. But a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who will speak at UC Santa Barbara this week maintains that it’s escalated to a different level under the Trump Administration.
"There is a lot that is very new in what we're seeing from ICE right now," said Caitlin Dickerson with The Atlantic magazine. "It's the sort of aggressive tactics that they're taking in the streets...stopping people at random, pulling people violently out of their cars."
Dickerson has been covering immigration issues for more than a decade. Before joining The Atlantic, she was at NPR and the New York Times, where she focused on immigration coverage.
She compared the Trump Administration policies now with what we were seeing a few years ago.
"ICE always tried to carry out arrests in a way that was as quiet and seamless and undisruptive to the public as possible," said Dickerson. "Now, they're making a big show of the arrests. The result of that is that the person that's being detained is often being subjected to more physically aggressive behavior. Also, people in the home are getting involved. Bystanders, protesters, all of that is escalating the situation, and that really is what's new."
Dickerson said while it was much lower profile in the past, it’s been an issue for presidential administrations for a quarter of a century.
"It is a long-running problem," said the journalist. "A lot of the issues that people are concerned about...people in detention facilities with bad conditions, people without any criminal record being deported from the United States, and the devastating ripple effects that can have in not just their homes, but their communities, for their employers. These are issues that have ebbed and flowed in the United States since 9/11. That's when immigration reform ramped up dramatically. The Department of Homeland Security was created, and ICE was created."
Dickerson noted that President Trump made immigration one of his key platforms in his first term in office. You'll remember his push to build border walls. But, Dickerson said, there’s a much different focus during his second term.
"The first term administration's focus was really on people crossing the border into the United States," said Dickerson. "Now, the current administration is really focused on immigrants who are already living in the country. Most of them have been living here for years or decades. So, the dynamic is very different."
The journalist said the president has gone well past his campaign promise of saying ICE and Homeland Security would focus on catching and deporting hardcore criminal undocumented residents.
"There is a sea change underway right now," said Dickerson. "It stems from this fundamental disconnect between the promises that Trump made when he was campaigning to deport millions of people a year, and the fact that we just don't have millions of undocumented residents in the United States that have serious, violent criminal records.
"They do not exist, and we've known that statistically for a long time," she continued. "When Trump was elected, the administration found itself in the position of having to deliver on a promise that it literally couldn't. That's when we've seen this dramatic expansion, where, as members of the Trump Administration have put it, 'Every immigrant is fair game.'"
Dickerson added that some of the arguments being used as justification for deportations by the Trump Administration are simply false.
"Research has shown for decades that immigrants without legal status are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens," said Dickerson. "They're also employed at much higher rates than U.S.-born adults."
She believes the protests we’ve seen across the country in response to the ICE raids have caused the Trump Administration to backpedal away from the high-profile, large-scale raids we were seeing a few months ago.
Dickerson will present Deported: The Price of Our Prosperity at UC Santa Barbara’s Campbell Hall on Thursday night.
