At the height of the campaign, carloads of masked people Immigration The officers were a common sight on the streets Minneapoliswhile thousands of people were running Arrested Every week in Texas, Florida and California.
“Turn and burn,” Supreme Border Guard Commander Gregory Bovino It’s called the strategy, with relentless displays of force and teams of customers descending on restaurant kitchens, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots.
In December, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents peaked at nearly 40,000 people nationwide, and were nearly as high the following month, according to data provided to the UC Berkeley Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press.
In late January, The Minneapolis Murders The killing of two US citizens by immigration officers and growing concerns about the government’s harsh tactics led to the killing of two of its citizens by immigration officers. shake A senior immigration official. In the weeks since, ICE arrests across the country have dropped by about 12% on average.
I found the ballot The public felt that Minnesota’s immigration enforcement operation went too far, a factor that may have contributed to the abrupt dismissal of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Kristi Noem In early March.
Bovino, who strutted the raid scenes in tactical gear and was the public face of the Trump administration’s crackdown, was pushed aside after the killings in Minneapolis. Rene is good and Alex Pretty. Border Caesar Tom Homan He was then sent to the Twin Cities to plot a plan A new immigration cycle implementation, and announced the withdrawal of immigration agents in the state on February 4.
An AP analysis of ICE arrest records shows the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan announced the withdrawal of his forces, the most recent period for which data is available, down from 8,347 weekly arrests in the previous five weeks. These arrest numbers were higher on average than during most of the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and were significantly higher than during the Biden administration.
But the numbers were not uniform across the country.
Arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases reaching their highest weekly number since the beginning of Trump’s second term. In Kentucky alone, weekly arrests more than doubled, reaching 86 by early March.
These increases were offset by sharp declines in a few large states, including Minnesota and Texas.
The Trump administration insists it is targeting evil criminals living illegally in the United States, and the president has referred to them as “ The worst of the worst“.
In some cases, the description is accurate, but the reality is complex.
Many of the most hardened criminals taken into ICE custody were already in prison, but many others arrested had no criminal history.
Nationally, about 46% of people arrested by ICE in the five weeks before February 4 had no criminal charges or convictions, and the percentage dropped to 41% in the five weeks after that.
However, this is still higher than the weekly average of 35% since Trump returned to office. In a number of states, even after February 4, the percentage of non-criminal detainees increased, rather than decreased.
Across the country, thousands of federal court filings provide an incomplete window into how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics remain on high alert, even if activity has waned.
He represented the 21-year-old Honduran man with no criminal record who petitioned for release after his arrest on February 22 at a traffic stop in suburban San Diego. The petition says the father of three US citizen children – ages 5, 3 and 10 months – was under ICE surveillance before being stopped by officers wearing tactical gear.
Or the 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, a well-known doctor in South Texas who worked in an area classified as medically underserved, who was arrested earlier this month with her five-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, on her way to her husband’s asylum hearing.
Officials said she was arrested for overstaying her visa.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnyk, a senior fellow in the American Immigration Council’s Research and Advocacy Group, says he sees signs of change in the decline in arrest and detention numbers, but cautions that it is too early to know whether these shifts are permanent.
“The Trump administration is saying, ‘We’re not slowing down, nothing’s changed,'” in immigration enforcement, he said. “But it’s very clear that they’ve rolled back some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown that has swept across Minneapolis.
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Kessler reported from Washington and Sullivan reported from Minneapolis. Associated Press reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed.
