Sen. Kamala Harris grills Homeland Security head on deportation threats to DACA recipients
During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Kamala Harris pressed acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf about deportation threats to hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients should the Supreme Court end the program. Harris cited a recent statement from acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Matthew Albence that the agency has in fact been set to target DACA recipients should the justices side with the Trump administration in a ruling that could come any day now.
“Mr. Secretary, last year Chief Justice Roberts said that the administration has ‘said they’re not going to deport’ DACA recipients and instead ‘work authorization and these other benefits are what’s at stake,’” she told Wolf. “Yet in January, acting ICE director Albence said that ‘if DACA is done away with by the Supreme Court—we can actually effectuate these removal orders.’ So that sounds to me like if the Supreme Court rules in your favor that you’re going to start deporting DACA recipients. Does the administration plan to deport DACA recipients?”
That would not be our priority, no,” Wolf claimed, but when later asked by Harris if a Supreme Court ruling would change “what you’ve been doing as it relates to DACA recipients that have remained productive law abiding members of their community,” he told her, “Again, it’s hard for me to say yes or no in a blanket. Obviously, they have a certain legality to be here in the U.S. If that is changed, we obviously have to access that. But again, what I’m telling you is—our focus will remain on removing criminals from the general public.”
But we know that what ICE claims before legislators and what it then does outside of a hearing room are two different things, because while Wolf keeps repeating that ICE’s focus “will remain on removing criminals from the general public” (here’s everyone’s regular reminder that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than U.S-born folks), agents assisting in raids have reportedly been told to, as The New York Times reported, “[a]rrest as many undocumented immigrants as possible, and ‘flood the streets,’ as one official involved said his bosses had put it.” Harris was not assuaged by Wolf’s response and continued to press for more clarity.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/5/1924648/-Sen-Kamala-Harris-grills-Homeland-Security-leader-on-deportation-threats-to-DACA-recipients?detail=emaildkre