That's 75 percent more people ripped from their families. That's t
ICE's Miami Field Office also deported 7,082 people, up 27 percent (from 5,562) in 2016.
There is one catch: As horrible as the latest numbers from ICE's might seem, they're actually far from Barack Obama's deportation peak: ICE reportedly arrested more than 10,000 people each year in Florida from 2009 through 2013. In 2011 and 2012, the agency apprehended more than 15,000 people in both years.
But that's hardly good news: Obama was labeled a "deporter-in-chief" by many immigrant activists, and for good reason: He ramped up immigration enforcement to previously unseen levels and, according to an analysis by ABC News, deported 2.5 million immigrants — more people than each of his predecessors combined. As other news outlets have noted, those numbers show just how easy it would be for the Trump administration to ramp up enforcement actions once more.
In total, ICE arrested 143,470 undocumented immigrants nationally, compared to 110,104 last year.
Throughout 2017, immigrant activists have warned that ICE has simply been meaner than it's been in years past: Leaked emails show former Homeland Security chief (and current White House chief of staff) John Kelly ordering ICE to portray undocumented immigrants as criminals (they aren't) in order to justify a slew of predawn raids this year. The emails were meant to downplay the fact that the agency has been going after people who haven't committed crimes.
After severe criticism, President Obama eventually ordered ICE to lay off deporting undocumented people who hadn't committed
In the meantime, noncriminals such as Arizona's Guadalupe García De Rayos (who had lived in the States since she was 14) were deported. Immigrants in so-called sanctuary cities were targeted for deportation raids as an extremely transparent fuck-you from ICE to city governments that refused to cooperate with Trump.
But Miami-Dade wasn't in that group: In January, county Mayor Carlos Gimenez infamously became the first big-city mayor to comply with Trump's sanctuary-city crackdown.
Sanctuary cities simply refuse to report arrested immigrants to ICE. Despite the way conservative media portrays sanctuaries, the cities indeed arrest and prosecute people — just without helping ICE deport them.
Gimenez was the subject of immediate protests, a hunger strike, and, ultimately, an ACLU lawsuit after the civil rights organization said Miami officials illegally held a U.S. citizen overnight in jail after ICE mistakenly demanded he