Stephen Miller mad: The Trump administration had been, at the beginning of its term, carrying out fewer deportations than the Biden administration had during the former president's last year in office. So Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff/hardcore restrictionist, started putting pressure on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to step up their game. Miller's goal? 3,000 arrests per day.
"Agents didn't need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away." It was a Miller-directed raid on Friday at the Home Depot in the Latino neighborhood of Westlake in Los Angeles that set off the protests and riots we're currently seeing, for which Marines and the state National Guard have been sent in, and a curfew now imposed. And this week's Just Asking Questions guest, longtime critic of California politicians Laura Powell, tells us that the actual number of people arrested in the precipitating event was very small, that the protesters and rioters themselves haven't even focused much on those cases, and that we don't know much about why exactly they were arrested:
