When President Donald Trump is hoping to rally his base, one of the things he typically does is try to remind supporters how tough he is on illegal immigration. But according to a report by The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer, agents for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are growing increasingly fed up with being used as a political football.
Blitzer notes that on June 17, Trump announced there’d be immigration raids the following week he promised would result in the deportation of “millions of illegal aliens.” But ICE, Blitzer reports, had to “scramble” in order to accommodate Trump’s announcement and wished he had given them more advance notice.
Carrying out the types of raids Trump wanted, Blizter explains, requires preparation — and ICE agents weren’t given nearly enough time to prepare. An ICE agent, interviewed anonymously, told Blitzer, “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation. It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.”
View the complete June 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.