At the peak of the strike, camouflaged cars EMIGRANTS officers were a common sight on the streets of Minneapoliswhile thousands of people were going arrested weekly in Texas, Florida and California.
“Go back and burn,” the Border Patrol’s top commander Gregory Bovino called the strategy, with relentless shows of force and teams of agents 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 nationwide and were nearly as high the following month, according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press.
At the end of January, the Minneapolis murders of two US citizens by immigration officers and growing concerns about the government’s heavy-handed tactics led to a shake of senior immigration officials. In the weeks that followed, ICE arrests across the country fell by nearly 12% on average.
The survey found The general public felt that Minnesota’s immigration enforcement operation went too far, a factor that may have contributed to the sudden firing of the Homeland Security Secretary. Kristi Noem in early March.
The numbers do not follow the same pattern everywhere
Bovino, who walked through the scenes of the raid in tactical gear and was the public face of the Trump administration’s crackdown, was sidelined after the Minneapolis killings. Renee Good AND Alex Pretti. Czar of the border Tom Homan was then sent to the Twin Cities to draft one new course for immigration enforcement, and he announced the withdrawal of immigration agents in the state on February 4.
An AP analysis of ICE arrest data shows the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan’s recall announcement, the most recent period for which data is available, up from 8,347 per week in the previous five weeks. Those arrest numbers were still higher on average than during most of the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term and were dramatically higher than during the Biden administration.
However, the figures were not uniform across the country.
ICE arrests rose sharply in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases reaching their highest weekly numbers since the start of Trump’s second term. In Kentucky alone, weekly arrests doubled, reaching 86 by early March.
Those increases were offset by steep declines in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.
Many arrested were not Trump’s ‘worst’
The Trump administration insists it is targeting the most vicious criminals living illegally in the US, and the president has referred to them as ” the worst and the worst.”
In some cases the description is accurate, but the reality is complicated.
Many of the most serious criminals arrested by ICE were already in prison, but many others who were arrested have no criminal history.
Nationally, about 46% of people arrested by ICE in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no charges or convictions, falling to 41% in the five weeks after.
However, this is still above the weekly average of 35% since Trump took office. And in a number of states, even after February 4, the percentage of non-criminals being arrested went up, not down.
Has there been a change in approach?
Across the country, thousands of federal court filings provide an imperfect window into how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics remain high, even as activity has waned.
Like the 21-year-old Honduran man with no criminal record who has filed for parole after being arrested Feb. 22 in a traffic stop in suburban San Diego. The father of three U.S. citizen children — ages 5, 3 and 10 months — had been under ICE surveillance, the petition says, before officers in tactical gear pulled him over.
Or the 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, a well-known South Texas doctor working in an area designated 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.
She was arrested, officials said, for overstaying her visa.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the research and advocacy group the American Immigration Council, says he sees signs of change in the lower number of arrests and detentions, but cautions it’s too early to know if those shifts are permanent.
“The Trump administration says, ‘We’re not slowing down,’ ‘Nothing has changed,'” in immigration enforcement, he said. “But it’s very clear that they’ve pulled back from some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown that swept Minneapolis.
By AARON KESSLER and TIM SULLIVAN Associated Press
Kessler reported from Washington and Sullivan from Minneapolis. Associated Press reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed.
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