What happened to focusing on ‘the worst of the worst?’

President Donald Trump and his team have vowed to focus on people they label “the worst of the worst” in their immigration enforcement efforts. They have flooded social media with mugshots and imagery of people who they say are killers, rapists, and sexual predators. However, the administration has been unwilling to release data showing what percentage of immigration arrests involve people who have been convicted of crimes.

“ICE is prioritizing public safety threats and national security threats, and the data proves it,” Border czar Tom Homan told a NewsNation town hall on October 15. He directed viewers to ICE’s enforcement website; but it hasn’t been updated since December, when Joe Biden was president.   

Pressed to provide the data, Homan made another claim: “Nearly 70-percent of everybody ICE arrests are either public safety threats or national security threats.”

However, 71-percent of people currently in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, according to data obtained by tracreports.org, which gathers and tracks government immigration data. 

When confronted with stats showing the vast majority of people in ICE custody aren’t convicted criminals, Homan provided an ominous explanation: “Most national security threats don’t have criminal histories.  They’re lying low to do the dirty deed.”

As WGN Investigates has previously documented: Homeland Security has repeatedly published false, misleading or unproven claims on social media. Earlier this month, they posted a picture of a man who they said was free despite a sex assault.

Last week: DHS trumpeted the arrest of a suburban police officer for overstaying his visa by a decade. The agency tweeted: “Governor Pritzker doesn’t just allow illegal aliens to terrorize Illinois’s communities, he allows them to work as sworn police officers.”

Only later did an official acknowledge a different division of Homeland Security gave the officer a permit to work in the U.S.

Homeland Security did not respond to repeated and detailed requests for comment about why its officials have not set the record straight when they’ve provided misleading information or why they don’t publish arrest data.

DHS officials are also fond of labeling everyone they arrest as “criminal illegal aliens” when the reality is more nuanced. Many of the people now being arrested and deported were here under asylum claims and had been provided temporary protected status under previous presidential administrations. Trump stripped that status, instantly removing protections for people who were following a legal process toward residency.

The government’s “shock and awe” style of street arrests seems to be part of the plan. 

“That turn and burn mentality,  we are going to turn and burn and we’re going to go throughout Chicago with reckless abandon professionally, legally, ethically and morally and arrest all illegal alien gang members that we can get our hands on,” Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino told NewsNation in a separate interview.

Border czar Tom Homan summed it up this way: “That’s the message we send: ‘enter the country illegally, don’t commit a crime but don’t worry about it unless you commit another crime no one is looking for you?  We’re never going to fix this problem.”