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Biden administration halts limits on ICE arrests following court ruling - CBS News
Jun 25, 2022 1 min, 32 secs

The Biden administration on Saturday halted its limits on immigration arrests to comply with a court ruling that took effect over the weekend, leaving deportation agents across the U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest immigrants deemed to pose a threat to public safety or national security, and migrants who recently crossed a U.S.

The rules, part of a broader Biden administration effort to reshape ICE's immigration enforcement functions, generally shielded unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the U.S.

While the suspension of ICE's arrest prioritization scheme is unlikely to place the country's estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in immediate danger of being arrested, the absence of national standards could lead to inconsistent enforcement actions across the U.S., including arrests of immigrants whom agents were previously instructed not to detain, legal experts said.

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, said ICE agents will still have law enforcement discretion to decide whether to make arrests.

But he said agents will no longer be barred by national rules from arresting immigrants whom the Biden administration sought to shield from deportation.

Without national rules, Chishti said, there will likely be significant "variations" in how different ICE field offices carry out arrests.

The memo suspended over the weekend is part of a series of rules the Biden administration has issued to narrow the groups of immigrants subject to ICE arrests in the interior of the country.

The Biden administration has also discontinued large-scale ICE arrests at worksites and expanded the list of so-called "protected areas" where deportations agents should generally not arrest immigrants to include disaster sites, places where children gather and social services establishments. .

Biden's appointees have argued the policy changes allow ICE's 6,000 deportation agents to use their finite resources to arrest immigrants who endanger public safety or national security.

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