Former acting ICE director: Publicizing deportations reduces effectiveness

A former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director encouraged the Trump administration not to publicize deportation efforts, citing safety implications amid other issues.

“You don‘t want to do anything to tip them where they might be lying in wait for an officer, especially if somebody is doing harm. So, one of the real cardinal rules of these types of operations is you don‘t do the publicity until it‘s complete,” John Sandweg said during a Tuesday CNN appearance.

“But the second reason is, it reduces the effectiveness of the operation. As word gets out that you‘re targeting individuals with a nexus to the criminal justice system, those individuals tend to disappear,” he added.

He said the Obama administration faced issues locating targets due to warnings about approaching operations.

Sandweg questioned the rapid rate of arrests by ICE officers, raising concerns with who would be targeted in future apprehensions once the criminal population is exhausted.

“I‘m going to be very interested to seeing what type of targeting, who they start prioritizing after they exhaust this criminal population. This part of it is the low-hanging fruit of the system in a sense, because you can you can just run these records and get good leads of individuals who‘ve been charged with or convicted of a crime,” he noted.

“But that‘s the natural place you start. The question becomes, what do you do next? And I saw Tom Homan say that maybe they‘re going to focus on fugitives, but you have to remember the fugitive and the immigration context is different than the criminal,” he added.

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