What they're not doing, though, is trying to clog up the actual immigration and deportation system with folks that actually aren't present in the country without legal authorization. Not for any beneficent reason, mind you - it's just in their self-interest to try to keep the wrongful detentions at a low-ish level, because those clog up the courts and use up ICE resources at a time when they're under massive pressure to make the unreasonable quotas being set by TPTB. Trying to hold onto a person who is a citizen, or a non-deportable person with status that can't be revoked, is a very low-reward action for them. When the Administration is targeting someone, that might be a different story - but for the bulk folks that are being detained, ICE does have incentives to make sure that they don't keep actual citizens or non-deportable persons in the system for very long.

Oh my, you're so naive. Do you really buy the Kavanaugh doctrine, that it's all okay because the goons will let people who have the wrong skin color go home immediately if they're not here illegally, "no harm done"? There is more than one purpose to all of this. One of the goals is to intimidate and scare all of us. When you label a whole city as "Democrats, Marxists, left wing lunatics" then everyone is fair game. Everyone needs to be put down, shot with pepper bullets and sprayed with tear gas. Anyone who comes close, who records video, who shouts in protest, is fair game to be arrested and disappeared at least for a while, to have their civil rights trampled at least a little bit, enough to scare them and their friends into never doing it again. The purpose is to bring everyone into submission. Hitler's Gestapo did it all legally too. First they revoked the citizenship of all the Jews, then they could deport them "legally" to concentration camps.