As a legal resident, that's basically why I feel pretty confident in my green card. What the fuck kind of priorities does ICE have if they are messing with people who actually have documents and are here rightfully while there's actual illegals roaming around?

Also, the fact that I live in SoCal, makes me feel pretty safe somehow. :)

Visibility, for one. Legal aliens are likely more confident in their chances to not be deported (and in the past, for rightful reasons), which makes them low hanging fruit for ICE which generally has zero accountability [1].

This can be for reasons like having a conviction within the past few decades or for more nebulous reasons. Even if you successfully fight deportation, you're still dealing with potentially being jailed and taken away from your life for no reason [2].

[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lawful-resident...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-professor-who-fa...

Oh, it gets worse than that.

Here's a case of a citizen held for more than three years in ICE detention. He's not eligible for compensation, because they held him long enough that the statute of limitations expired.

> There is no right to a court-appointed attorney in immigration court. Watson, who was 23 and didn't have a high school diploma when he entered ICE custody, didn't have a lawyer of his own. So he hand-wrote a letter to immigration officers, attaching his father's naturalization certificate, and kept repeating his status to anyone who would listen.

> Still, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Watson imprisoned as a deportable alien for nearly 3 1/2 years. Then it released Watson, who was from New York, in rural Alabama with no money and no explanation. Deportation proceedings continued for another year.

> Watson was correct all along: He was a U.S. citizen. After he was released, he filed a complaint. Last year, a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing "regrettable failures of the government."

> On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is "disturbing," the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540903038...

From the article linked in a sibling comment:

“Documented immigrants can now be deported from the United States if they break the rules of federal and state programs that offer public benefits to immigrants.

New guidelines implemented last week by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services say that immigrants who abuse “any program related to the reception of public benefits” will be summoned to appear before an immigration court.”

Basically... By misrepresenting themselves in order to steal services to which they are not entitled. This seems to me like something that either is already, or ought to be, a crime.

There are, however, some more egregious errors on the part of ICE (rather than CIS, mentioned in the article). I just can't trust people to be honest with the details here.