Acting head of ICE: Step up family deportations

WASHINGTON — The new top immigration official signaled Tuesday his agency is looking to step up deportations of families who are in the United States illegally, actions that would likely run into logistical hurdles and face strong public opposition.

Mark Morgan, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency would continue to prioritize deportations of people who have criminal histories, but that no one should be exempt from enforcement.

“That will include families,” he said at a roundtable with ICE officials and reporters.

The comments by Morgan, who took over the position last week, show a willingness to embrace a part of President Donald Trump’s tough immigration agenda that past officials had balked at. Morgan is a former head of Border Patrol who was fired by Trump early in his presidency, but then returned to his good graces after regularly defending Trump’s immigration policies on Fox News.

ICE is the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law in the interior of the U.S. Part of its mission is to arrest immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

More than 200,000 migrant families have been released into the country since Dec. 1. A massive backlog of immigration cases means they will be in the country for years before their cases are decided. Morgan said generally people who have been ordered removed by a judge stop showing up for court dates, meaning ICE officers must search for them in order to deport them.

It’s a difficult effort. There is little room to detain families while they wait for travel papers to be deported — federal family detention centers can house up to about 2,500 people, but are already full. Children cannot be detained longer than 20 days, which means ICE officers would need to have much of the paperwork completed before they took a family into custody or risk having to release them and lose them into the interior again.

ICE resources, much like other border agencies, are strained.