BREAKING: President Biden just issued new ICE guidance wholly abandoning his pledge to halt deportations. ACLU says this is "a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration’s earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies" of Trump and Obama.

The ACLU is livid about this broken promise:

The seven-page guidance can generally be characterized as a return to form viz. immigration enforcement under the Obama administration. Some of the new provisions are likely to be of extreme concern to immigrants, immigrant communities and immigration rights activists/advocates:

Most headlines about this have not taken stock of the full nature of this "interim guidance." MSM largely appears to be taking ICE at their word that the new enforcement priorities (really just the old enforcement priorities) are "targeted" toward criminals. But that's not true.

As the "removal priority" sections above—which work in tandem—show, new undocumented immigrants are subject to immediate deportation. That's a HUGE departure from what Biden promised and has nothing to do with public safety or criminal law. Being undocumented is a civil offense.

Media criticism: journalists like Buzzfeed's @Haleaziz and the AP's @benfoxatap who reported on this using the Biden/DHS/ICE framing of "public safety" and "targeted enforcement" have clearly buried the lede here. And, of course, acted as stenographers for ICE's press release.

A properly contextualized story to come for @lawcrimenews. Follow us if you're interested in any and all legal news. Please don't follow me unless you're mainly interested in retweets.