Small one-horse towns in the South have a reputation for posting tiny 20 MPH signs on major roads through town and then giving police officers quotas of speeding tickets to give out, to finance the town. Donald Trump is taking that concept to a whole new level. On Saturday, he ordered ICE to increase the number of arrests from a few hundred a day to at least 1,200—preferably 1,500—a day because his million-person deportation project is off to a slow start. Each ICE field office is now required to make 75 arrests a day, and managers will be held accountable for missing the target. In other words, if some office falls below 75 arrests/day for too long, the manager will be fired. That certainly gives the manager an incentive to tell the field officers to arrest anyone who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant—for example, if they have brown skin and speak Spanish—without too much regard for whether they happen to be a U.S. citizen or not. Border Czar Tom Homan told ABC News yesterday that this is only the beginning.
Trump is known for having little patience with excuses, like "there just weren't 75 undocumented immigrants in our district yesterday." His goal is to scare management and officers into rounding up people to arrest and deport without a lot of regard to whether they were legally in the country or not. If this gets too aggressive, though, and deports too many American citizens who then sue, the backlash could be severe. Trump doesn't care—the base wants blood and blood they will get. (V)