New statisitics show that the deportation of Europeans is up significantly since President Trump took office. While ICE continues to focus enforcement efforts on deporting Latino immigrants, the deportation of Europeans is likely to have increased by nearly a third since Trump took office over the same period in Fiscal Year 2016.
Some European immigrant communities in the United States showed some support for Trump’s candidacy last year in the expectation that increased ICE activity would spare the undocumented from their home countries. Many believed that only Muslims and Latinos would be caught in the Trump enforcement net. What they have found, instead, is that even though whites are not primary targets for ICE, many Irish, Polish, Italian, Greek, and other Europeans are being jailed and placed in removal proceedings.
The recent wave of arrests is spreading fear through immigrant communities that had once felt immune to the sorts of sweeps that Asian and Latino immigrants had often experienced. Ethnic organizations in these communities report rising numbers of calls by immigrants worried about their futures.
