The sister of a woman allegedly murdered by six noncitizens said President Donald Trump’s administration is targeting the wrong people for deportation and is not doing enough to get the worst of the worst off U.S. streets, even as authorities embark on a massive deportation effort.
Tiffany Thompson, whose sister Larisha Sharrell Thompson was shot and killed in South Carolina last month, said she was angered that while deportations have played a central role in Trump's administration, more hadn’t been done to target those who were charged in the killing — particularly the alleged ringleader, who faced a previous charge before her sister was killed.
“It’s frustrating that they’re illegal and they committed this crime. They should have been deported, maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” Thompson told NBC News in an interview. She added: “I don’t know where Trump is right now.”
The notion that a family member of someone allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant would call Trump to action over his signature issue comes amid broader questions about how the president is executing his mass deportation policy.
Though from a different point of view, Tiffany Thompson’s anger mirrors the anxiety rippling through Los Angeles over Trump’s deportation efforts there, culminating in protests and some violent clashes and driven by the belief that the administration is indiscriminately removing noncitizens instead of targeting removal of criminals in an attempt to laud a high number of arrests.
Polling shows immigration remains Trump’s strongest issue, though the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll conducted last week illustrated a gap: A 55% majority said they like the goals of Trump’s deportation program, while 44% said they like how “he is going about it.” Americans narrowly said they believe Trump is prioritizing dangerous criminals (53%) versus prioritizing nondangerous people (47%) for deportation.
And to the extent there is sharp division over Trump’s immigration policy, it’s not over efforts to deport convicted criminals. More than 80% of Americans support deporting those who have committed violent crimes, according to the Pew Research Center data from late February and early March.
“What this administration is doing is going after low-hanging fruit: collateral arrests, stripping protections,” said Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of Immigration Hub, a national immigration policy group. Lopez derided Trump administration tactics, including stripping Temporary Protected Status from Venezuelans and agents making arrests outside immigration courthouse hearings.
“They are creating the chaos,” she added. “They aren’t going after violent criminals. They are creating undocumented people.”
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, pushed back on that characterization on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, saying that the enforcement actions in Los Angeles last week stemmed from a criminal investigation targeting specific people as part of a larger alleged conspiracy. They were not, Homan said, a random immigration raid.
“I said from day one, Jan. 20, we will prioritize public safety threats and national security threats. However, we will enforce law, particularly — I may prioritize my family life over my work, doesn’t mean I ignore my work,” Homan said. “We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’ve been honest about that from day one, especially in sanctuary cities. When we can’t get the bad guy in the safety and security of a jail, they release them to the street. Well, we got to go to the street and find them.”
Data shows that violent crimes committed by immigrants are rare when compared with the general population.
“We often will hear about a very high-profile event, and not to reduce the tragedy of it — obviously, a crime is still a crime, and it’s incredibly painful when you know when people are affected by those sorts of things — but looking at numbers and statistically speaking, it’s not as though a higher presence of immigrants creates a higher presence of crime,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration policy think tank. “That’s been pretty proven through various studies over the years.”
But as the Trump administration has pointed to arrestees as “rapists” and “killers,” competing narratives have stacked up with examples like a child suffering from cancer ordered to self-deport, university students targeted for removal and advocacy groups sounding alarms over violations of human rights and due process.
Some Trump supporters have spoken out about the impact of a dragnet detaining those here legally. An Argentinian couple from North Carolina, who said they had backed Trump, were apoplectic after their 31-year-old son, a green-card holder in the country since he was a toddler, was arrested and detained in Georgia.
“He didn’t say he was going to do this, that he was going to go after people who have been here for a long time,” the mother, Debora Rey, said of Trump in an interview with The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He said he was going to go after all the criminals who came illegally. ... We feel betrayed, tricked.”
At the same time, noncitizens charged with violent crimes are still making headlines. Under President Joe Biden, Trump attacked such crimes as evidence of a broken system that required his election to fix.
Now, he and Republicans hold up those incidents — including the recent attack in Boulder, Colorado — as evidence that deportations should be more widespread. Authorities announced they elevated their deportation efforts and lauded a record-breaking day of arrests last week.
