ICE has goal to deport 400,000 this year.

From the Don't Tase Me Bro blog.
ICE: Pumping Up Detention Quotas

Post quotes the Washington Post as saying ...

In a Feb. 22 memo, James M. Chaparro, head of ICE detention and removal operations, wrote that, despite record deportations of criminals, the overall number of removals was down. While ICE was on pace to achieve "the Agency goal of 150,000 criminal alien removals" for the year ending Sept. 30, total deportations were set to barely top 310,000, "well under the Agency's goal of 400,000," and nearly 20 percent behind last year's total of 387,000, he wrote.

Beyond stating ICE enforcement goals in unusually explicit terms, Chaparro laid out how the agency would pump up the numbers: by increasing detention space to hold more illegal immigrants while they await deportation proceedings; by sweeping prisons and jails to find more candidates for deportation and offering early release to those willing to go quickly; and, most controversially, with a "surge" in efforts to catch illegal immigrants whose only violation was lying on immigration or visa applications or reentering the United States after being deported.

So, watch out. ICE is low on its quotas and looking for people to deport. Remember, in any bureauracracy, internal goals are always important. Regional managers will probably each have portions of this assigned to their region, and they'll be reporting regularly to the director how they are progressing to meet those goals. The same for the next layer down, and the each layer below that, before each individual ICE agent in the field is told that they have to deport more people.

Note that this is the opposite of justice. You'd expect ICE to be making decisions on a case-by-case basis related to the facts of the case. Instead, ICE agents are like traffic cops in a small-town speed trap, with a quota of how many people they need to deport this year, this month, this week.

Welcome to freedom and justice, American style.

I'd better keep an eye on this. Since ICE acts like any bureaucracy, you can expect that if the quota isn't met by the end of the year, then I'm sure they'll work their way back to looking at the descendants of German immigrants from a hundred years ago and seeing if our semi-litterate ancestors with weak English language skills made any mistakes on their Ellis Island immigration forms. Ze Quota Must Be Filled!