'We are less safe': Former DHS official blasts Trump's 'racist policies' on MSNBC
President Donald Trump's promise to make American communities safer by deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up and detain immigrants may be doing the opposite, according to one former ICE leader.
During a Monday segment on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," Jason Houser – who served as ICE's chief of staff during former President Joe Biden's administration — said Trump's "racist policies" are only making public safety worse. Houser expanded on a New York Times op-ed he wrote in April, in which he said that ICE under the second Trump administration was "burning thousands of federal law enforcement hours on operations that privilege political objectives over public safety."
"We have a situation here where the White House is choosing quotas of arrests of non-criminal migrants — sometimes grandmothers, vulnerable populations, children — those that can't even possibly be removed by ICE," he said. "They're prioritizing those arrests over carrying out not only ICE operations that protect us from national security and public safety threats, but ... dismantling investigations, and the joint terrorism task forces, and drug interdiction agencies and collaboration of law enforcement from state and local law enforcement with the federal agencies. We are less safe when we have these sort of activities.
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Houser also expressed alarm at the news that the Trump administration was deploying 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to quell the protests, saying it "raises so many questions of how they'll be able to carry that out in collaboration with ICE" along with determining rules of engagement and command structure. He also questioned whether the Marines had been properly trained in crowd control and doubted that they could be trusted to de-escalate tensions between police and protesters.
"These are extremely dangerous times. And clearly the individuals in the White House do not take these issues seriously," he said. "ICE has an important national security mission. There are people that want to take advantage of our immigration system. Our immigration system is broken. But this White House is continuously choosing divisiveness over the safety of migrants, but also the safety of ICE officers."
In response to Houser's comments, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace pointed out that 87% of Americans polled by the New York Times and Siena College were in support of deporting "adjudicated violent criminals." However, she then observed that the level of support drops significantly to less than 15% when respondents are asked whether they support deporting people who have no criminal records, who are married to Americans and who have children in the United States. Houser countered that he believed the Trump administration was hoping to inflame tensions in order to justify a harsh response.
"You can clearly foresee how this administration has has wanted to get to this point," Houser said. "They've talked about this for months. they wanted to use the military as the tip of the spear to carry out these non-criminal arrests. You're going to see potentially the military used for detention, support services, security services ... and that is just going to amplify the divisiveness. It is not making us more safe."
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Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.
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