(WASHINGTON) — As top Trump administration officials press for more deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it had deported 142 migrants in the Houston, Texas, area illegally in the United States and convicted of crimes to Mexico, over a two week period.
From May 19 to 30, ICE says the agency removed eight gang members from the United States, 11 convicted individuals who committed crimes against children and a man who entered the U.S. illegally 21 times.
In total, the migrants were convicted of 473 criminal offenses and entered the United States 480 times, according to ICE.
ICE says there were also 30 who were convicted of robbery and grand larceny, 43 who were convicted of aggravated assault and 48 who were convicted of drug crimes they removed.
Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly,” said ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford. “For the past few years, there was virtually no deterrent to illegally entering the country. As a result, millions of illegal aliens poured into the country including violent criminal aliens, child predators, transnational gang members and foreign fugitives.”
Bradford said that “many of these dangerous criminal aliens went on to prey on law-abiding residents in local communities right here in Southeast Texas and we’re laser focused on identifying them and removing them from the country before they harm anyone else. This is just a small snapshot of those efforts as it only focuses on deportations to one country over the course of a two-week period, but it gives you an idea of how big this problem really is.”
It comes as in mid-May, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, was at ICE headquarters alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and urged senior leaders at ICE and Homeland Security Investigations to step up their deportation efforts, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
The meeting was attended by senior ICE leaders and the special agents in charge of Homeland Security Investigations. Border czar Tom Homan was absent from the meeting.
Miller told senior ICE leaders that the Trump administration wants to triple the daily number of arrests agents were making up to 3,000 per day, according to sources.
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