After getting caught boasting last week because ICE was detaining the same number of people as Joe Biden’s Administration, the Administration has now imposed quotas — demanding that ICE arrest up to 1,500 migrants a day, which WaPo may have been the first to report.

Johnny Maga, a far right propagandist who never tires of looking like a stupid idiot, reported that with great excitement. Quotas!!!

Not so Stephen Miller. He got pissy that WaPo described, in both the subhed and in paragraph after paragraph of the report, that this will lead ICE to arrest non-criminals. Here’s how WaPo described the problem.

The orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics or face accusations of civil rights violations as they strain to meet quotas, according to current and former ICE officials.

[snip]

Neither ICE nor Homan responded to requests for comment. After an earlier version of this article was published, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an email that, “your story is false,” but did not reply when asked for specifics.

[snip]

But Paul Hunker, a former ICE chief counsel in Dallas, said arresting serious offenders takes time, staff and planning — more time than quotas might allow.

“Quotas will incentivize ICE officers to arrest the easiest people to arrest, rather than the people that are dangerous noncitizens,” said Hunker, who, as the agency’s chief counsel in Dallas, oversaw offices in North Texas and Oklahoma from 2003 through January 2024.

Fox, in its story lifting the WaPo story (with attribution but not a link), instead provided paragraph after paragraph providing excuses.

As CATO reported recently, this is what happened last time: Trump focused so much on asylum seekers, he left criminal aliens to roam free.

Candidate Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda will make the country less safe in two significant ways. First, it would remove a population that is less likely to commit crimes, ultimately making America’s neighborhoods less safe. For instance, Cato’s research has shown that both legal and illegal immigrants are nearly half as likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States. With unique data from Texas, we have found that immigrants—both legal and illegal—are less likely to commit homicides. Numerous studies have also found that immigration is linked to lower crime rates, homicide rates, and drug-related deaths.

The second problem with mass deportation is just as significant: it would shift focus away from the removal of immigrants who do commit crimes. Noncitizens who commit serious crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and deported. Whatever amount the government spends on immigration enforcement, it should spend on detaining and removing this small minority of individuals. Donald Trump claims that he did that, but the facts tell a different story regarding his record on migrant criminals:

• On his fourth day in office, Trump signed an executive order rescinding Obama-era policies that prioritized the detention and removal of serious public safety threats;
• Within a few months, his administration was secretly separating families, using prosecutorial resources to jail migrant parents and focusing resources on visa overstays, not serious criminals;
• During the height of family separation, Trump deprioritized prosecuting migrants with criminal histories to instead spend resources on separating families;
• While Trump poured resources into detaining asylum seekers, he also released nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers;
• ICE ended up (re)arresting nearly 11,000 noncitizens who entered under Trump and were convicted of non-immigration crimes, including rape and murder; and
• Trump’s policies incentivized migrant criminals to enter, triggering a threefold increase in the number of convicted criminals attempting to cross the border illegally.

Miller predictably is already trying to spin the civil violation of illegal entry into a crime, to say nothing of paying Social Security that you’ll never get in return as a tax crime.

Which is what two experts told Axios would happen: Miller would have to falsely claim a larger pool of migrants are criminals because he falsely told stupid Trump voters there were more criminal aliens during the election.

What they’re saying: “There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport,” Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.

• Trump “keeps trying to bullsh-t with the public that there are all these particularly serious so-called criminals. There aren’t enough of those people to exist to be 1 million,” Karen Tumlin, director of the immigrant legal advocacy group Justice Action Center, tells Axios.
• Both Hallett and Tumlin expect Trump to begin calling all undocumented immigrants “criminals” in order to say millions of criminals could be deported.

Remember, during the election Trump and Miller falsely claimed there were over 400,000 criminal aliens wandering around, when that stat primarily counts the number of people who are already safely housed in US prisons.

Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” Trump wrote in another Friday post. They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote, escalating his rhetoric, on Saturday.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

The new statistics, released by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, said there were 425,431 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions.

Trump lied to his rubes, with the able assistance of his chief racism advisor. And now he’s struggling to assure his supporters he’ll deliver the eye-popping numbers he promised.

Which is why I’m laughing so hard at Johnny Maga.

Because even if Trump meets these quotas — quotas which will end up focusing on the law-abiding migrants rather than the dangerous people Miller has been wailing about — he’ll only deport 547,500 people this year, nowhere close to the mass deportations he sold his rubes.

You all lied. You lied and lied and lied to make voters afraid.

And already on day 8, you’re spinning wildly rather than simply admitting you cynically lied to gin up fear to get Trump elected.

Update: Greg Sargent discussed this at length in his podcast today.