Desperate to meet record-setting arrest and deportation quotas set by the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has launched a new strategy to boost numbers: Send text messages to undocumented immigrants who are in the U.S. lawfully under an order of supervision and request they show up for a “case review” at their local ICE field offices.
That’s what happened to a client of Jessica Mayo, a co-founding attorney for the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project, of St. Louis.
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At 4:30 p.m. Monday, the man received a text ordering him to report to the ICE field office at 1222 Spruce Street in St. Louis this past Tuesday or Wednesday, Mayo said during a press conference Wednesday morning across the street from the office.
“I soon learned that he was not the only one to receive the text messages,” Mayo said. “We have heard this happening from attorneys in at least 14 different cities around the country, from Seattle to Tampa. Based on that, we suspect that these text messages went to hundreds—if not thousands—of immigrants.”
While some of the immigrants were allowed to check in and leave, “the majority are being detained where they reported as instructed,” Mayo said. They are urging people who receive the text messages to show up with legal counsel, if possible.
For many years, long-term undocumented immigrants were allowed to remain and work in the U.S. as long as they did not break the law and took part in regular check-ins with ICE, usually once a year.
Then senior Trump immigration officials sent out a directive on Monday stating that “more people needed to be detained each day,” Mayo said. The new tactic of using text messages to lure unsuspecting immigrants, she says, “seems to be in direct response to that.”
The Guardian, a British publication that closely tracks the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement activities, reported Wednesday that top ICE officials this past weekend “instructed rank-and-file officers to ‘turn the creative knob up to 11’ when it comes to enforcement, including by interviewing and potentially arresting people they called ‘collaterals,’” according to internal agency emails viewed by the newspaper.
The newspaper also reported that the ICE officials urged officers “to increase apprehensions and think up tactics to ‘push the envelope,’ one email said, with staff encouraged to come up with new ways of increasing arrests and suggesting them to superiors. ‘If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,’ another message said,” according to the Guardian.
As ICE escalates its tactics, members of the public are sometimes pushing back.
Last week, the New York Times reported on the case of Carol Mayorga, who has lived for nearly 20 years in the Missouri Bootheel town of Kennett.
Mayorga, an undocumented immigrant from Hong Kong whose legal name is Ming Li Hui, has been detained in a Springfield jail under ICE custody since late April. She’d traveled from Kennett to the St. Louis ICE office for what she thought would be a routine meeting to renew her employment authorization form. Instead, ICE agents arrested Mayorga and sent her to the Springfield jail to await deportation.
Mayorga, a popular waitress at the local Waffle House, has become a cause célèbre in the town of 10,000. Her arrest and detention has set off an outcry among the people of Dunklin County, even though its voters overwhelmingly chose to reelect Trump last year.
On Wednesday, Mayorga’s attorney said she had been released, according to NPR’s Midwest Newsroom.
Sara Ruiz, the executive director of the Ashrei Foundation, and a member of the Rapid Response Coalition, says everyone can play a role in helping protect vulnerable immigrants.“I think the first thing is, we have to build enough resilience to keep talking about all of this,” Ruiz tells SLM. “We have to talk more about it. We have to talk to elected officials about it, locally, at the state level, at the federal level. We can’t take this as the norm, and it won’t change unless enough of us are talking about it.”
