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 angst 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 individuals 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 show that violent crimes committed by immigrants are rare when compared to 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.
“President Trump is working at record speed to clean up Joe Biden’s Open Border Disaster that let countless unvetted illegal aliens pour into the United States and threaten the safety of American citizens,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a written statement. “The President has closed the border and now he’s deporting illegal aliens, especially violent criminals. The recent attack in Boulder just underscores why the President’s work is so important.
“We’re grateful the media is now admitting that illegal aliens pose a risk to the safety of the American people and look forward to the stories about why Joe Biden let so many violent criminals into the country in the first place,” Jackson continued.
The Larisha Thompson case
In the Larisha Thompson case, six individuals who do not have legal status, according to the Department of Homeland Security, were charged. That includes 21-year-old Asael Aminadas Torres-Chirinos, who faces three firearms charges and, according to DHS, had previously been arrested on a domestic violence allegation. Lancaster County lawyer Doug Barfield said Chirinos’ 2022 charge was still pending. He added that immigration authorities had placed detainers on all six of the individuals, which would prevent them from going free even if they posted bond.
Tiffany Thompson said she “wished they would have seen that,” referencing Chirinos’ previous arrest and the fact that he was still in the country. She didn’t specifically cast blame on any administration but remained angry that the suspects — including teens who were 13, 14 and 15 years old — were attempting to be released on bond.
“Would I like for Trump to get ahead of this? Yes,” she added.
The pace of deportations has bothered the White House, and NBC News reported top Trump aide Stephen Miller berated and threatened to fire senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in May if they did not begin detaining 3,000 migrants a day. Miller also threatened to fire leaders of field offices posting the bottom 10% of arrest numbers monthly, NBC News reported.
Yet, that’s exactly the tactic that immigration experts say will do little to protect against national security.
“There’s really no incentive for ICE to spend a bunch of resources investigating and tracking down people in the field. It’s about convenience primarily, and public safety is a distant second,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-aligned public policy think tank.
“The Laken Riley Act specifically says you should be prioritizing resources to go after people who have been arrested on violent or property offenses. So they supported that bill,” Bier said, referencing the law Trump signed in January, which requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested or face charges, or who have been convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.”
After signing the law, Trump said, “That’s why I’m here instead of somebody else. Actually, it’s the biggest reason.”
Bier said the argument after signing the law was, “They said: ‘This is going to prevent more Laken Rileys.’ And then they have done nothing to implement it.”
The administration and allies reject that assertion, saying they are arresting criminal noncitizens and are moving as quickly as possible to reverse the impacts of lax border policies under Biden. In March, DHS touted its success in deporting convicted criminals and those who had pending criminal charges.
“He is dealing with what Biden and Kamala Harris facilitated … He keeps going as fast as he can, trying to fix a million different issues,” said Nicole Kiprilov, the executive director of The American Border Story, a group that elevates “the human stories of American citizens impacted by the border crisis.”
“These people now who are committing crimes under the Trump administration are people who were brought in by Biden,” Kiprilov said. “They were not brought in by Trump.”
Kiprilov noted that Trump has turned off the flow of illegal immigration by shutting down the southern border.
In a written statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens to make America safe. In the first 100 days, 75% of ICE arrests were criminal illegal aliens with convictions or pending charges. The shocking story here is that instead of deporting many heinous criminals, the Biden Administration chose to RELEASE these known public safety threats into our communities instead of deporting them.”
Currently, 56% of those in ICE detention have either been convicted of a crime or have pending criminal charges, according to ICE data. The remainder do not have criminal histories.
