On Tuesday, the days after hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants they lost their temporary protected status that allowed them to live and work in the United States, Republican analysts said Steve Bannon they wasted little time demanding their immediate removal.
“I was under the impression that when they removed TPS and their eligibility for the program ended … they would be getting on a plane or a bus today … today, early this morning to go back to Haiti,” Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, said. The War Room podcast Tuesday. “Why aren’t they abroad?”
Mike Davis, a conservative political strategist, agreed with Bannon: “The solution is to get these people out of our country as quickly as possible, and that includes these Haitians.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has been a vocal critic of Trump’s deportation policies because he doesn’t see them as extreme enough, called Haitians “the worst of all people” and “people with a very low IQ” on his Rumble show Tuesday night.
On the Telegram channel run by the Proud Boys of Columbus, a member posted a clip of the song “I’m Walking on Sunshine” along with information about revoking the temporary protected status. “They have to come back,” the member wrote.
It’s been a while since shock and fear tactics from Immigration and Customs Enforcement first gained notoriety nationally. For several months, figures as a former leader of the Border Patrol Greg Bovino terror cities like Minneapolis and Chicago. But since he fired former Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and replaced her with Markwayne Mullin—referred to derisively by Bannon as “Kung fu master”—ICE operations have dwindled to a shadow, though agency transfers and arrest numbers they are left astronomical.
In recent weeks, things are heating up again.
Earlier this month, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo He is in Houston, Texas. Araujo had lived in the country for 35 years, had three children, and had his own business. A few days later, another ICE agent was killed Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero He is in Biddeford, Maine. Both people were shot while in their cars. ICE, as WIRED has revealed, is also there track down his critics onlineusing a data proxy for “identify unaccompanied minors,” and worked to keep government health inspectors out through its network of detention centers. on tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was now targeting immigrants at airports whose visas have expired, or are in transitory status, to arrest US citizen spouses.
However, Steve Bannon and other Republican pundits are not alone: Support for ICE among Trump’s most loyal supporters remains very high, with 74 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans saying they have confidence in ICE. according to a YouGov poll published last week. The same poll shows that 80 percent of MAGA Republicans oppose ending ICE.
YouGov’s findings were supported by another poll published last week by Public Religion Research Institute, which found that three quarters of Republicans had a positive view of ICE, would be in favor of more funding for the agency, and did not agree that ICE was making society less safe. The survey also found that 73 percent of Republicans support it prison camps to detain “immigrants who are in the country illegally” until they can be deported.
The YouGov poll also found that only 51 percent of Republicans, in the week of the shooting, had read, seen, or heard anything about immigrants being shot and killed by ICE agents. What they may have seen is Trump’s Social reality almost at the same time. In the post, Trump appeared to overturn an internal ICE memo telling agents to conduct traffic stops, after an angry response from his MAGA base. He also told his supporters that ICE was “loved and respected in America.”
