This is an adapted excerpt from the May 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
On Thursday night, the United Federation of Teachers joined state and local officials at the Tweed Courthouse in lower Manhattan to protest for the release of Dylan Lopez Contreras, a Bronx high schooler. Contreras is an asylum-seeking migrant from Venezuela. He goes to a school called Ellis Prep in the Bronx and works as a delivery driver to help support his family.
Last week, he became the first known New York City public school student to be arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Donald Trump’s second term began. All week, we have seen protest after protest for his release. The people of New York are clearly outraged, and they’re not the only ones.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” one Kennett resident told The New York Times. “But no one voted to deport moms.”
Kennett, Missouri, may be about as different from New York City as a place can be. While we don’t have election results for the city itself, it is the largest city in Dunklin County, which voted for Trump last year by a margin of more than 4 to 1. You would think that if anywhere in the country would support Trump’s immigration policies, it would be a place like Kennett.
But when Carol Hui, a long-time resident of Kennett and mother of three who works as a waitress at the local diner and is an active member of the local church, got arrested by ICE earlier this month, the residents were shocked.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” one resident told The New York Times. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves … This is Carol.”
The diner that Hui worked at, John’s Waffle and Pancake House, is normally closed Tuesdays. But last Tuesday it stayed open. They called it “Carol Day.”
The staff and their families wore shirts that read “Bring Carol Home.” All of the proceeds from every meal went to a fundraiser for her. They filled every seat and raised nearly $8,000 that way. But more people wanted to help than the diner had seats, so they put out a donation box for people who couldn’t get in, and they raised nearly another $12,000 that way. On every table, in between the jelly packets and the ketchup, was a petition to bring Hui home — hundreds of locals have signed it.
The Trump administration is reportedly aiming to deport a million people this year. Big numbers like that are abstract and hard to wrap your head around. But when someone from your own city, your own town, becomes one of those 1 million people, it becomes much more real.
Maurilio Ambrocio is a pastor at a local church in a town just south of Tampa, Florida. Just a few weeks ago, Ambrocio was arrested by ICE and is now slated for deportation. Speaking to NPR, one of Ambrocio’s neighbors said he voted for Trump, but when he heard about what happened to the pastor, he was beside himself. The neighbor said he was hoping Trump would target people “without papers” or “with criminal records.” But he never expected someone like Ambrocio to be taken away.
“You’re gonna take, you know, a community leader, a pastor, a hardworking man,” the neighbor said. “What, did you need a number that day?”
On Wednesday, during an appearance on Fox News, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller answered that question. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day,” Miller said. “And President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day.”
To put that quota system in perspective, in the first 100 days of Trump’s new term, ICE averaged 665 arrests a day. That means this quota system is pushing ICE agents to arrest 4.5 times as many people per day than their already unbelievable pace.
On Wednesday, Axios reported that when Miller announced this quota internally, people at the Department of Homeland Security left the meeting “feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren’t reached.” Beyond how much these arrests have upset their communities, another thread links the arrests of Contreras, Hui and Ambrocio: Contreras was arrested at a courthouse after he showed up for a routine immigration hearing. Ambrocio, who has done a check-in with immigration agents once a year for the past 10 years without incident, was arrested at this year’s visit. Hui got a sudden call late last month asking her to drive three hours to ICE offices in St. Louis. It felt suspicious, but as she put it to the Times, “I didn’t want to run … I just wanted to do the right thing.” She was arrested and put in jail while she awaits deportation. But to get the kind of deportation numbers Trump is aiming for, ICE appears to be arresting anyone it can. These stories are, unfortunately, the new normal. All across the country, immigrants are showing up to routine court hearings and check-ins, doing their best to follow the law to become citizens legally, only to be arrested, jailed and slated for deportation. Trump claims his immigration agents are only going after the worst of the worst, hardened criminals. But to get the kind of deportation numbers Trump is aiming for, ICE appears to be arresting anyone it can. Earlier this week, The Los Angeles Times reported about a 4-year-old girl in California with a life-threatening medical condition who, along with her family, was ordered to leave the country despite her doctor’s warning that if treatment is interrupted, she would die in a matter of days. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported on a 2-year-old American citizen who was deported to Brazil alongside her undocumented parents. However, since the girl is not a citizen of Brazil, she has become “all but stateless.” Earlier this month, the Supreme Court stripped 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants of their protected status, opening them up to deportation. And Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States will “aggressively” revoke student visas from Chinese students. There are roughly 275,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. right now. What are the odds that one of those Venezuelan immigrants or one of those Chinese students lives in your city or your town? How soon until we all know a Dylan Lopez Contrera or a Carol Hui or a Pastor Maurilio Ambrocio from our own lives?
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Sam Henneberry
Producer, The Briefing with Jen Psaki
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