from Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, March 30, 2025

Immigration

Trump’s promised mass deportations haven’t materialized yet. Instead, his administration has resorted to kidnapping foreign students off the streets. The widely circulated video of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken into ICE custody by masked agents depicts a woman in a headscarf on her way to celebrate a Ramadan break fast, looking about the furthest thing possible from a threat to our national security. The best ICE could muster was that she co-authored an article calling for Tufts to allow students the opportunity to criticize Israel. Deborah Fleischaker, the Biden administration’s chief of staff, said in the New York Times that she thought the arrest was a First Amendment violation and that “ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action.”

Why is this happening? Why did ICE arrest a mechanical engineering student at the University of Alabama, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, a recent graduate of Columbia with a green card, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School who came here after protesting for Ukraine, and students at Georgetown and Cornell? What prompted Secretary of State Marco Rubio to claim at least 300 student visas had been revoked?

We can make an educated guess. By February 11, NBC was reporting that Trump, who had promised mass deportations while on the campaign trail, wasn’t happy with the pace of removals. They reported that a person who was “familiar with Trump’s thinking” said that “It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people.” That happened despite January reports that Trump officials had given ICE officials daily arrest quotas. The Washington Post reported that “Each field office has been instructed to make 75 arrests per day, with managers ‘held accountable’ for failing to meet the targets.”

Those targets would have increased arrests across the nation from a few hundred each day to a range of 1,200 to 1,500, but where were the people to come from? It’s not like ICE wasn’t doing anything before Trump resumed office. The federal crime of “aggravated reentry,” which applies to people who reenter the United States without permission after a previous deportation and have a history of violence or gang affiliation, was already a high priority for prosecution. So ICE appears to have turned to low-hanging fruit: foreign students on visas who participated in First Amendment-protected protests.

On February 12, 2025, The Guardian reported that two senior ICE officials were reassigned over the “slow rate of deportations and arrests” and that the “reassignments were a result of ‘frustration that deportation and arrest numbers were not increasing fast enough’ to meet the Trump administration’s targets.” On February 21, CBS reported that the acting head of ICE had been reassigned due to similar concerns.

Numeric production targets may work for manufacturing Teslas, but they’re a horrible idea for law enforcement. They distort police exercise of discretion and force officers and agents to focus on meeting quotas, not doing justice. Studies show that when law enforcement officers have quotas imposed, they ignore violent crime and focus on easier, quicker cases to meet targets. Quotas increase the potential for officer misconduct. The classic example of setting quotas is for traffic tickets—imagine how much worse the incentives are when a president decides to force dramatically more arrests and deportations. That could explain why students’ visas are being revoked and suggests that there will be more. 

This rivals the family separation policy of the first Trump administration for sheer inhumanity. But it also harms Americans in very real ways. Who will want to study or come work here in this climate? Just one example, nearly 25% of practicing doctors in the United States are international medical graduates, demonstrates how this harms our own future prospects.

Americans continue to rise to the moment in ways both big and small. In Boston, residents posted information about handling encounters with ICE agents.