It was then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly who ordered the internal ICE smear campaign to portray the immigrants they were sweeping up—many of whom had no criminal record—as dangerous, emails show. Publicly, the administration was claiming ICE was targeting so-called “bad hombres” during the initial raids following Donald Trump’s poorly-attended inauguration. But in reality, this was a lie. The batch of communications obtained through the Freedom of Information Act earlier this month show Kelly and his agents intentionally molding a false narrative in order to justify their cruel deportation sweeps:
On February 10, as the raids kicked off, an ICE executive in Washington sent a directive to the agency’s chiefs of staff around the country. “Please put together a white paper covering the three most egregious cases,” for each location, the acting chief of staff of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations wrote in the email. “If a location has only one egregious case — then include an extra egregious case from another city.”
As a reader of The Intercept pointed out, the email’s subject line — “Due Tonight for S1 – URGENT” — meant that the request had been made by the secretary of Homeland Security himself, referred to as “S1” in department shorthand.
But dozens of the undocumented immigrants arrested during these raids had no criminal record. In Texas, immigration officials moaned about difficulty finding “egregious cases” to exploit. “I have been pinged by HQ this morning indicating that we failed at this tasking,” stated one email from an agent at ICE’s San Antonio office. Among the more than 50 arrested there, the majority had no record. The Intercept reports that “DHS officials tried—and largely failed—to engineer a narrative that would substantiate the administration’s claims that the raids were motivated by public safety concerns.”
While Kelly spent only six months as the head of Homeland Security, he unshackled ICE in the most cruel ways during that short time.
Under his watch, agents stalked immigrants outside courthouses, arrested immigrants on their way to a hospital for care, arrested immigrants dropping their children off at school, used children as bait to lure in undocumented family, and deported at least one Dreamer with DACA protections. Before he left, the agency faced a lawsuit after border agents allegedly turned asylum seekers away, in violation of law. Kelly’s military background may read “discipline,” but anyone who’d join and then stay for a second job in the Trump administration is reprehensible through and through. He’s just better at disguising it.