ICE’s quieter crackdown is pointed right at legal immigrants

President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant push looks far different now than it did just a few months ago. We’ve seen a major retreat from the very public rampages across the states last year. But less visibility from Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t meant an end to the crackdowns.

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Instead of the chaotic sweeps that drew mass protests, the Trump administration is now busying itself stripping legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The calmer, quieter deportation campaign is less prone to grab headlines, but the administration is counting on it to create a new pool of targets for meeting ICE’s deportation quotas.

You need to look no further than a federal courtroom in Boston, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to remove more than 900,000 people admitted under the Biden administration. All the migrants in question used the CBP One app to schedule an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They were then granted two-year terms of humanitarian parole as a result while awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge.

The Trump administration attempted to roll back that decision last year in a mass email telling recipients it’s “time for you to leave the United States.” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled against the administration’s efforts in March, noting that the sweeping order did not provide any reasoning for the decision to revoke parole for the recipients or provide proof to support that reasoning.

Last week, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley informed Burroughs that DHS means to try again. Foley noted in her filing that this time around, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection had issued a memo “explaining the reasons why, in his opinion, the purpose(s) of individual paroles for aliens who entered on parole after making an appointment through the CBP One App have been served, and why parole is no longer appropriate for those aliens.”