from the it’s-only-a-quota-when-we-need-it-to-be-one dept
Arrest/ticketing quotas have almost always been found illegal by courts. They used to be commonplace, but courts (at all levels) have generally ruled that quotas pervert incentives so much they encourage open, deliberate abuse of constitutional rights.
Enter the Trump administration, which only considers the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct. Trump deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has spent the early months of his return to office berating ICE for not being willing to raid more Home Depots while pressuring immigration agencies to deliver 3,000 migration-related arrests per day.
Obviously, this means DHS components no longer need to concern themselves with finding dangerous criminals. Anyone looking Latino enough is grist for the deportation mill, which leverages the inherent bigotry of the current administration, along with tons of questionable law enforcement techniques, to generate hundreds of arrests per day, with most of those slated for immediate removal.
Even so, ICE has still failed to hit the 3,000/day quota. And that means every day moves it further away from the Trump administration’s desire to remove 1,000,000 migrants a year from the United States. (*Brown people only. White “refugees” are welcomed to exploit white flight conspiracy theories to secure protective asylum.)
The administration is turtles all the way down, but with racist garbage instead of turtles. Deputy Ghoul Miller thinks 3,000 racially motivated arrests is good government business. Donald Trump – who’s always been a fan of unreasonable numbers so long as they’re big enough — thinks the Land of Free should just push Lady Liberty’s corpse into the sea and send at least 1,000,000 people seeking a better life to whatever hellhole is willing to turn deportees into dead people. And that’s why this government is doing steady migration business with places like El Salvador (overseen by another authoritarian “populist”) and South Sudan (Vietnam circa 1967 but with less water and more random missile fire).
Courts have been kind of reluctant to engage with the Trump administration. There are several reasons for this.
First, some courts seem actually gobsmacked that an American administration would do the sorts of things the Trump regime has been willing to do.
Second, courts are having trouble squaring this new reality with far more sedate court filings by litigants, meaning the government tends to be given more space to operate, even when it’s clearly in the wrong.
Third, courts are seeing their orders ignored by the Trump administration, which is extremely demoralizing for courts, not to mention for the hundreds of millions of Americans the courts are supposed to be protecting.
And that brings us to the Supreme Court. More courts are being dissuaded from challenging the open consolidation of executive power because it’s become extremely clear that the nation’s top court doesn’t really consider itself to be part of the checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Instead, this lying ass court touts “originalism” in support of its action/inaction in subservience to the Second Coming of King George III, embodied by a guy in an ill-fitting white polo who openly cheats while playing a game no one but the people playing actually care about.
If these aren’t quotas, what even the fuck are they?
The Trump administration internally has set a goal of deporting 1 million people during Trump’s first year and has changed ICE leadership personnel three times, according to the Washington Post.
At the end of May 2025, “Stephen Miller, a senior White House official, told Fox News that the White House was looking for ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day, a major increase in enforcement. The agency had arrested more than 66,000 people in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, an average of about 660 arrests a day,” reported the New York Times. Arresting 3,000 people daily would surpass 1 million arrests in a calendar year.
If there’s no actual quota, Trump admin officials wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing. Getting 3,000 arrests per day would accomplish 1,000,000 arrests per year. Miller has applied pressure of his own, demanding to know why ICE isn’t just raiding any place that might contain non-whites, including (direct quote) “Home Depot.” And that’s why we were unfortunate enough to witness a Fallujah-style raid of a Los Angeles swap meet with plenty of military troops in tow. Unfortunately for the reanimated corpse that is Stephen Miller, this massive raid only resulted in a handful of arrests.
Courts are now asking questions about statements Trump and Trump officials have made in relation to deportation efforts. And now that courts are asking questions, the current regime has shifted to its SOP: obvious lies.
[W]hen federal judges pressed for details about that figure last week [3,000 per day arrest quota], the administration denied any such quota existed. The contradiction came in a lawsuit that alleged the intense pressure to rack up arrests had led ICE to conduct illegal sweeps in Los Angeles.
Judge Jia Cobb has already declared this quota to be illegal, ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit filed in Washington. Another federal judge in California (Trina Thompson) came to the same conclusion while blocking the administration’s arbitrary decision to end the protected status of thousands of refugees.
What does the administration have to say in response to these obvious rulings in favor of justice? Not much, actually. Just more of the same “might means right” wet-brain thinking that has always defined any Trump administration:
[O]n Friday, the Justice Department said no such orders had ever been given.
“DHS has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” a Justice Department attorney reported to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday.
It’s all a lie. And it’s an obvious lie. DOJ lawyers claim the quota directly attributed to Stephen Miller on multiple occasions is nothing more than conjecture by journalists quoting “anonymous sources.” It’s nice to know the Trump administration doesn’t actually believe Fox News employs any journalists, because this is what always goes ignored when Trump officials start pretending there are no deportation/arrest quotas in place:
While DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the quota claim to “anonymous reports in the newspapers,” he didn’t mention that Miller — Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser — had publicly confirmed the 3,000-daily-arrest “goal” in the televised interview on Fox.
The Orwellians are alive and well. But they’re not the “Deep State.” They’re the officials demanding everyone acknowledge their version of the truth — the ones who view us as millions of inconvenient Winston Smiths that should be humiliated and silenced for daring to question the state. We are subject to a succession of racist, lying fucks. Meanwhile, Second Amendment enthusiasts are uttering their full support for encroaching authoritarianism, practically daring us to follow through with the prying of the guns from their cold, dead fingers.
Filed Under: bigotry, bullshit, dhs, doj, due process, ice, mass deporation, trump administration
