One year in, a look at the impact of Trump's immigration crackdown

Amna Nawaz:

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Minneapolis today, as federal agents continue to clash with protesters two weeks after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old mother Renee Good.

Vance had this message for city residents:

Vice President J.D. Vance:

Do we want these things to happen? Do we want these arrests to be so chaotic? No, we don't. These guys want it least of all. But if we had a little cooperation from local and federal -- or -- excuse me -- from local and state officials, I think the chaos would go way down in this community.

Amna Nawaz:

This is just the latest development in what's been a turbulent year as President Trump has carried out his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration.

Liz Landers takes a closer look.

President Donald Trump:

First, I will declare a national emergency at our southern border.

(Applause)

Liz Landers:

President Donald Trump wasted no time following through on his campaign promise to crack down on immigration, signing executive orders his first day in office designed to expedite removal and reinterpret the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution.

Border crossings began to drop soon after and are down dramatically year to date, a 93 percent reduction, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The agency estimates 1.9 million self-deportations and 622,000 deportations have taken place in the last year.

President Donald Trump:

This was an invasion. This wasn't people coming in. This was an invasion of our country.

Liz Landers:

But the administration quickly ran into legal challenges with some deportation measures when it deported more than 200 Venezuelan men to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

President Donald Trump:

These were bad people. That was a bad group of, as I say, hombres.

Liz Landers:

The president invoking the little used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, claiming the men were part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, among them Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man with no criminal record, deported despite a court order barring his removal.

Abrego Garcia was eventually returned to the U.S. and is now challenging efforts to deport him to a third country. A ruling is expected next month. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist, signaled a crackdown on international student visas in early March.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.

Liz Landers:

In total, more than 8,000 student visas revoked in the past year, the State Department says.

The Trump administration has also moved to narrow pathways for legal immigration, using executive orders to institute travel bans in June, revoke humanitarian programs that shielded migrants from deportation and cut refugee admissions to record lows.

The shooting of the two National Guardspeople in the nation's capital in November prompted a further tightening of visas. Also this year, the administration began a controversial rollout of deportation operations in major sanctuary cities across the country, with agents often masked arresting immigrants at workplaces, courthouses, even Home Depot parking lots.

In June, fiery protests in Los Angeles caused President Trump to send in National Guard troops.

President Donald Trump:

These are paid insurrectionists. These are paid troublemakers.

Liz Landers:

Prompting the president to float the idea of using the Insurrection Act, which would allow the president to use the military in a domestic setting. It's a threat he's continued to make into the new year.

Kristi Noem, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary:

We did discuss the Insurrection Act. He certainly has the constitutional authority to utilize that.

Liz Landers:

Those targeted operations spread nationwide to Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and, just this week, Maine, all this bolstered by a surge in funding after the president's signature tax and spending bill passed in the summer, tripling the annual budget for ICE.

The administration faced significant legal pushback in Chicago, when a federal judge there determined Customs and Border Patrol official Greg Bovino was overstepping his authority in handling protesters.

Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol Commander:

The use of force that I have seen has been exemplary, and, by exemplary, I would say, the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission.

Liz Landers:

In the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed woman, Renee Good, by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, protests flared again.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with this message to ICE officers:

Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.

Liz Landers:

But Democrats are hoping to use the latest incidents to reduce funding or force changes to immigration enforcement if they do well in the midterm elections.

Joining us now to discuss all of this are Chad Wolf. He's a former acting secretary of homeland security in the first Trump administration and the current executive director of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. And John Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE in the Obama administration.

Thank you both for joining us.

Chad, I want to start with you.

The president campaigned on this issue of cracking down on illegal immigration, getting rid of people who are in the country illegally. But some of these chaotic scenes that we're seeing out of Minneapolis, just this week, we have seen CBP officer Bovino using a smoke canister to clear a crowd, some of this is causing public opinion to turn on him.

Polls are showing that a majority of Americans think that ICE is going too far. Could this become a political problem for the president?

Chad Wolf, Former Acting U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security: Well, I think it's certainly a political issue.

I think it's important to remember, as you indicated, the president ran on a very aggressive agenda, and the American people agreed with him, but first to secure the border, which I think most Americans would agree that has happened. We have record low apprehension numbers.

The second part, which is the most difficult part, is to figure out where the millions of folks went to that came across that border during the Biden administration, and then to remove the ones that don't have a legal right to be here. So that's what they're doing in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, but other places, like Texas and Florida, also have a very high illegal alien population, but you don't see those making the news, right?

You don't see big operations in Florida and Texas making the news, and why is that? Because you have local law enforcement that support them. And so places like Minneapolis and others are really the exception to the rule, the rule being that that close support with local law enforcement really makes ICE's job, they really do it outside of the limelight, right?

But when you don't have that, then ICE is in the forefront.

Liz Landers:

John, speaking of how ICE operates, yesterday, we learned about an internal ICE memo that authorizes officers to use force to enter a residence without a judge's warrant to arrest someone with an administrative final order of removal.

Vice President Vance said today that this practice was also used in previous administrations. Was this part of the training and guidance when you oversaw ICE?

John Sandweg, Former Acting ICE Director:

Liz, it wasn't.

It was a widely held belief and a firm legal opinion of the department that you cannot forcibly enter a residence without a judicial warrant, right, a warrant that -- where you swear out an affidavit explaining the probable cause and it's issued by a federal judge or a magistrate.

Let me give you just a quick backdrop on this. I mean, a lot of this is about -- first of all, ICE has become very good at making apprehensions of people at their residences without those judicial warrants. In my experience, it was incredibly rare and I can't even think of a single case where we obtained a warrant by a civil enforcement action.

That said, the agents were great, would approach the home, knock on the door, ask the target to exit the house, make the arrest there, or gain the consent of the homeowner in order to enter the home. It really wasn't a significant impediment in ICE's operations.

What's changed, though, of course, Liz, is that as part of these really highly publicized and, in my experience, highly unusual law enforcement operations, immigration and advocacy groups have cautioned people to explain, really been aggressive in promoting efforts to so people know their rights, giving out those little cards saying, know, be aware of your rights.

And included in there is this idea or the fact, rather, that ICE agents could not enter a home without a judicially authorized warrant. Running up against that, I'm sure the pressure at the agency, it would be very cumbersome and slow if they had to go get a judicial warrant every time.

Liz Landers:

Chad, I want to ask you, the administration says that ICE agents have absolute immunity. We have heard that from administration officials.

Do you think they should in all cases?

Chad Wolf:

Well, I think law enforcement enjoys some pretty broad immunity to do their job, absolutely.

But depending on if it's a state official or a federal official, there are limits to that. So a lot depends on circumstances. A lot depends on the action that they're involved in will depend on what type of consequences can be held.

I will go back just to that last question. I think the larger issue here at play is that -- and John's right. You do have activist groups that are saying, look, here's what you can do to stop ICE. Here's what you can do to slow them down.

We have entered this world where most -- where there are some people here that think ICE is some type of second-class law enforcement agency, that it's OK to put your car in the middle of an operation, it's OK to slam the door in their face. You would never do this for the DEA, the FBI if they are doing a criminal operation in your neighborhood.

But yet somehow people believe it's OK to do that because it's just ICE. They're just enforcing immigration law. These are -- they are criminal operations that ICE is involved in. I heard recently they go door to door. They don't go door to door. They have targets that they are identifying.

That could be in a car if they do a vehicle stop or it's in a house if they approach the house. These are criminal enforcement actions. And this idea that you're going to have activists and agitators and others trying to impede or not adhere to lawful commands is absurd. You would never do that in any other type of law enforcement operation.

And so I think the local officials, whether that's a mayor or a governor or it's your activist, telling citizens to do certain things, they're putting them in danger.

Liz Landers:

John, I want to ask you also about this image that we saw of this 5-year-old boy who was held in Minnesota by ICE yesterday.

ICE has said that the child was abandoned by his father who was in the country illegally and was being pursued by officers. But officials from his school have said that officers used him to lure family members from their home.

How should agents navigate this kind of situation? And do -- did the agents do the right thing here?

John Sandweg:

Liz, it's hard to know in any one of these particular cases, right? We're only hearing glimpses of it, and we're thousands of miles away from where these incidents happen.

That said, I will say one thing, a couple of observations I have made. I do worry about the agency's reputation. I do worry that it's impacting its ability to do its job. And I do worry that what Chad is talking about, the lack of respect the agency is getting, some of this is brought on by the actions the agency is taking or the manner in which they're being deployed.

In that case there, for instance, right, boy, you want to have an -- you can have an immigration enforcement policy that also recognizes we need to protect family unity at all costs. I understand there are allegations the father went away. And, again, I don't know all the facts.

But what I do know is, my understanding is, there was no criminal history there. And typically what the agency would do, and even I venture to say, when I worked with Tom Homan, Tom would do, is that, if you encounter a case like that, where you decide we need to take an immigration enforcement action, it doesn't necessarily mean we have to effectuate an arrest.

Or if we do effectuate an arrest, we can at least wait until the mother or a legal guardian arrives to take custody of the 5-year-old without threat of being arrested. But when you adopt this zero-tolerance approach, it creates these situations where now you're going to have these risks of separating families.

The public has to see this image of ICE agents hauling away a 5-year-old kid wearing a snow hat that looks like an elephant. And it's hard to go out there and say, hey, we're really focused on the worst of the worst, and we're a serious criminal law enforcement agency out here to promote public safety when you see images like that.

I would just -- listen, I think -- I'm not saying -- I think -- I have heard people say it's a choice. It's a choice between open borders and supporting criminal aliens or the images we're seeing. And I just reject that. The Obama administration was heavily criticized for its immigration enforcement record.

We deported hundreds of thousands of criminal aliens, and we did it without any of the scenes you're seeing today or 5-year-olds, images like that, being separated from their brothers and sisters.

Liz Landers:

John Sandweg and Chad Wolf, thank you so much for joining the "News Hour."

Chad Wolf:

Thank you.

John Sandweg:

Thanks, Liz.