ICE launches low-key immigration raids targeting migrant families
A small number of coordinated federal raids targeting undocumented migrant parents and their children took place over the weekend, the beginning of President Donald Trump’s plan to swiftly enforce deportation orders against thousands of recently arrived migrants who are not eligible to remain in the country.
Only a handful of arrests appeared to take place, and they were reported in only a few cities. That was much different from the nationwide show of force that had originally been planned, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were expected to fan out in unison Sunday morning across immigrant communities in major cities. But authorities said more arrests would follow through the week.
The plans for the operation were changed at the last minute because of news reports that had tipped off immigrant communities about what to expect, according to several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials familiar with the matter.
Instead of a large simultaneous sweep, the authorities created a secondary plan for a smaller and more diffuse scale of apprehensions to roll out over roughly a week. Individual ICE field offices were given the discretion to decide when to begin, one official said.
The first reports of ICE activity came in Friday and Saturday. In Chicago, a mother was a apprehended with her daughters, but the family was immediately released under supervision according to a person familiar with the operation.
In New York, ICE agents attempted two arrests Saturday in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, and a third in East Harlem, according to the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs. “No arrests were made to our knowledge,” the office said in a statement.
An additional operation was reported in Florida.
Immigrant advocates in targeted regions of the country who were standing by to support anyone who was arrested were surprised to have a relatively uneventful day.
Sunday morning, about 30 volunteer “ICE chasers” had fanned out across the Atlanta suburbs, where many Latino immigrants live. But after nearly three hours without any reports of arrests, they returned to the offices of a local advocacy organization, saying they would start again Monday morning.
In Los Angeles, Shannon Camacho, a coordinator for the city’s rapid response network for immigrants, said the group’s work over the weekend, helping unauthorized families prepare for possible detentions, was not wasted. While there have been no mass arrests so far, she said, families are now better prepared for whatever happens in the future.
Camacho also warned against paying heed to speculation on the internet. “We do get a lot of false alarms on social media, and that causes a lot of panic in the community,” she said. “People are afraid to go outside, to go to church, to go to the grocery store, and that’s harmful.”
Immigration authorities planned to continue making arrests throughout the week in at least 10 cities. They had identified at least 2,000 targets for the raids, but may ultimately arrest fewer. Typically, only 20 to 30% of the targets of ICE enforcement are apprehended. And because agents cannot legally force their way in to the homes of their targets, they rely on the element of surprise to be successful — suggesting that the current, highly publicized raids could result in even fewer arrests than usual.
The operation is one of the first to target parents and children, part of the recent wave of migrant families who have arrived from Central America on the southern border, many of them seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.