With Trump\'s crackdown on immigration, detentions spike, DREAMERS threatened | News

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown produced a spike in detentions by deportation officers across the country during his first months in office.

Meanwhile, arrests at the border dropped to a 45-year low, according to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security.

The explanation from think tanks and the administration is Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies made the United States seem less hospitable to people who might come to America — and to immigrants already here.

The Associated Press reported “a striking uptick in arrests away from the border. Those arrests have sparked fear and anger in immigrant communities, where many worry the government is now targeting them.”

ICE calls the detentions “interior removals,” and the number for the fiscal year ending Oct. 1 jumped 25 percent to almost 82,000. The increase is 37 percent higher after Trump’s inauguration than the same period the year before.

Threatening immigrants living in the U.S.

In February, former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who now serves as Trump’s chief of staff, scrapped the Obama administration’s policy of limiting deportations to people who pose a public safety threat, convicted criminals and those who have crossed the border recently — effectively making anyone in the country without permission vulnerable to apprehension.

Trump also signed a series of travel bans aimed at curtailing who can enter the country, pushed to overhaul the legal immigration system, tried to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, and moved to lift the Obama-era protections for immigrants brought into the United States as children under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

Challenging the president’s policies at the state level, and influential at a national level, was Milwaukee-based Voces de la Frontera.

In December, more than 100 Wisconsin residents with VDLF went to Washington, D.C., to call on House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and others to pass a “clean” DREAM Act to protect young immigrants.

“I’ve lived in Milwaukee since I was 9 years old,” said Mayra Jimenez, a DACA recipient and member of the Voces-affiliated Youth Empowered in the Struggle. “I went to Washington because we need a clean Dream Act for my family, many of my close friends, and the youth like me. I hope what we are doing today will touch Paul Ryan’s heart.”