For those wondering how President Donald Trump is going to find the personnel to crack down on illegal immigration like he promised during the campaign, it appears he’s managed to start with the old Barack Obama standby: a pen and a phone.
And his people didn’t even need the phone, for good measure.
On Thursday, the administration’s acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, Benjamine Huffman, announced that she was issuing “a directive essential to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations” — a move that would deputize law enforcement officials in four federal enforcement branches to “investigate and apprehend illegal aliens,” the media release read.
“The directive gives Department of Justice (DOJ) law enforcement officials in the U.S. Marshals, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons authority to investigate and apprehend illegal aliens,” the media release read.
“Thanks to the last Administration’s open border policies, we’ve seen violent criminals and gang members terrorize American communities,” Huffman said in the release.
“Today’s action empowers law enforcement officials at the DOJ to help identify and apprehend aliens who have illegally come into our country. Mobilizing these law enforcement officials will help fulfill President Trump’s promise to the American people to carry out mass deportations.
“For decades, efforts to find and apprehend illegal aliens have not been given proper resources,” she concluded. “This is a major step in fixing that problem.”
How major? Well, if you run the numbers, this means 80 percent more potential deportation officers available.
Combined, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have roughly 40,000 agents at their disposal in one way or another — “more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel” for ICE and 19,357 Border Patrol agents.
So far is Trump living up to his promises and your expectations?
Yes: 100% (975 Votes)
No: 0% (4 Votes)
As for the posse that the latest executive order from the Trump administration could potentially round up, it could theoretically almost double that amount.
The DEA currently has roughly 4,600 special agents. The U.S. Marshals has almost 3,900 deputies and criminal investigators. The ATF, 2,597 special agents. And the Bureau of Prisons, a whopping 20,446.
Put that all together, that’s roughly 31,543 backup law enforcement officials to assist the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — over 80 percent of their total force as it stands now.
Naturally, this is purely hypothetical stuff; we can’t just take every agent from critical federal law enforcement organs and redirect them to focus solely on the mess former President Joe Biden’s administration (and prior administrations, it must be noted) made. This is a contingency plan, not a massive resource shift.
However, for every Democrat who scoffed at the impossibility of the logistics of cracking down on illegal immigrants and the border crisis, let this be a wake-up call: Trump has the resources, and he’s going to use them.
And so far, at least, Trump’s all-hands-on-deck approach is yielding results.
On Thursday, Fox News reported, over 530 illegal immigrants were detained in a single day in several cities, including several child sex offenders and 16 gang members, including four involved with the hyper-violent Tren de Aragua gang that has been terrorizing residents in numerous cities over the past year.
“The haul is the latest day of busy work for ICE, which is leading the mass deportation operation launched by the new administration,” Fox News reported. “Before Thursday, ICE had made 460 arrests since Trump was inaugurated.”
Which makes one wonder: What, precisely, was former President Joe Biden doing for his four years in office as America faced the worst border crisis in our history? If this is the difference just a few days could have made, let this be a reminder there were 1,466 days that Biden could have done something — anything –while he was in office, and he didn’t.
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