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In an interview on Sunday, President Donald Trump said he fully supports his administration’s violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids of immigrant communities across the U.S., adding that he believes ICE agents “haven’t gone far enough.”
During an interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes” program on Sunday evening, correspondent Norah O’Donnell asked Trump to respond to criticisms that ICE agents were acting too aggressively.
“More recently, Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?” O’Donnell asked.
“No. I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama,” Trump said.
Trump then claimed that “many” immigrants living in the U.S. are “murderers” or other types of “criminals.” In reality, studies have consistently demonstrated that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, including violent crimes, than documented residents and U.S. citizens. According to ICE’s own data, more than 7 in 10 people the agency has detained have no criminal background whatsoever.
Beyond the incidents cited by O’Donnell, there have been numerous documented instances of masked ICE agents assaulting and intimidating immigrants and protesters. Some of this violence has had fatal outcomes; in one case, a federal agent shot and killed a Chicago-area father, and two people have died after being hit by cars while desperately fleeing ICE raids.
Polling indicates that most Americans think that ICE has been going too far. According to a CBS News/YouGov survey conducted late last month, 53 percent of Americans say ICE is detaining “more people than necessary,” while only 16 percent say the agency has been detaining “fewer people than necessary.”
On the question of whether ICE’s tactics are an overreach, the numbers are similar — 53 percent believe ICE’s enforcement of Trump’s directives is “too tough,” while only 17 percent say they agree with the president that they’re “not tough enough.”
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