"Papers, please"

**Winehole23** · 10-14-2025

whole neghborhoods in major US cities are hunkering down in fear not from crime or immigrants, but from violent immigration enforcement

**Winehole23** · 10-14-2025

Obviously, I don’t think we’ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this. During the Obama administration, we did a large number of nationwide operations, but they’re very targeted. They’re the kind of work where you’re going after specific individuals, people that you knew had a criminal history. They were carefully selected. There was a lot of research and investigation done before you went out to make the actual arrest. These are much more akin to area sweeps, where they’re going out and just stopping people in the streets, or working in conjunction with other law enforcement as they execute traffic stops, or hitting a large number of apartments in a building where you suspect people are undo ented. We’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, the deployment of FBI agents and other law enforcement agents to supplement DHS efforts, the pulling of these border patrol agents into these urban cities. All of this is unprecedented. 

When you’re at ICE, of course you can run down to a Home Depot parking lot. Any administration could have done this: round the Home Depot parking lot, stop a bunch of day laborers and ID them. In car washes, in places where low-wage workers work, places like that. The reason that historically hasn’t been done, is you just don’t find criminals there. Once in a blue moon you find someone, and we see that the administration highlights when they get someone who has some criminal history. But by and large, your really serious criminal threats don’t do shifts at the local car wash for minimum wage. They’re out making their money, making a living as a criminal. 

And so ICE has always focused our operations on getting those individuals — that takes more time, though. You’re taking lists of people who are criminally convicted and you’re identifying them, and then once you identify them, you’re doing research on addresses, and then you’re building a dossier and sending a team out to get them. The Obama administration deported a large number of people, but generally, a very high percentage of them were people who either just crossed the border or people with a serious criminal history. 

Sandweg worked at the Department of Homeland Security for five years, spending four years as legal counsel. He capped off his DHS tenure with a one-year term leading the nation’s immigration enforcement agency from 2013-2014.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...r-q-a-00603916

**Winehole23** · 10-14-2025

Are we seeing a brand-new shift in ICE’s mission and directive?

I wouldn’t say it’s a shift, this has always been a key part of ICE’s mission. What’s different is who they’re targeting. Under Obama, under Biden and even to a certain extent, under the first Trump administration, there were priorities. The agents were told, “Focus first on the worst. Worst first. Get the worst bad guys off the street first, we’ll deal with everything else later.” Those rules are gone.

Where do we go from here? How do we de-escalate?

Look, the country needs to pass immigration reform. We revert back to ICE’s more traditional tactics of focusing on “the absolute worst first.” This is a difficult question that the country has struggled with. We have people in this country for 15, 20 years who have been out of status, and in that time they’ve had children, they’ve married U.S. citizens, they’ve integrated themselves, they’ve gone to church, made friends with people at work. They’ve just integrated themselves in society. 