On the anniversary of his second inauguration, Donald Trump wrote online that he wanted his administration to focus more on “talking about the murderers and other criminals” that “the Department of Homeland Security and ICE … are capturing and taking out of the system.” The president apparently meant what he said — and he hasn’t stopped repeating the talking point lately.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, he said at a recent Mar-a-Lago event, are “taking out murderers, they’re taking out drug lords, they’re taking out people from mental institutions. … They’re taking out the roughest people.” Around the same time, at a North Carolina event, the Republican similarly boasted, “We’re really focused on the bad people,” arresting “murderers, the drug dealers, the ones from prison.”
Late last week, Trump assured reporters, “We’re focusing on the criminals, the killers.” A few days earlier, in an NBC News interview, the president added, “We are totally focused on criminals, really bad criminals. … I’m talking about murderers from different countries.”
Congressional Republicans, taking their rhetorical cues from the White House, have tried to stick to the script. On Tuesday morning, House Republican Whip Tom Emmer appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference and, in apparent reference to immigrants being targeted by the administration, began his remarks by saying, “Pedophiles. Rapists. Murderers.”
The Minnesota Republican similarly held up a photo of a suspect, under an all-caps headline that read “Worst of the worst.” The four-word phrase was familiar, in large part because it’s the same phrase Trump has repeated countless times in recent years, emphasizing who exactly would be targeted by federal immigration agents.
What GOP officials refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the talking point isn’t true. CBS News reported this week:
Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.
The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations across the U.S.
The CBS News report hasn’t been independently verified by MS NOW, but a variety of media outlets have run related reports in recent weeks and months, emphasizing the simple fact that, as The New York Times recently summarized, “The vast majority of immigrants arrested have no convictions for violent crime.”
A recent report from the Cato Institute similarly found that of all the people booked by ICE since Oct. 1, only 5% of them had a violent criminal conviction — and of those with any kind of criminal conviction, most had been found guilty of misdemeanors, including traffic convictions.
If Trump were “totally focused on … really bad criminals,” the country would be having a very different kind of conversation. Reality, however, is stubborn.
