Under Trump, ICE arrests double for migrants with no criminal records
Immigration arrests rose 32.6 percent in the first weeks of the Trump administration, with newly empowered federal agents intensifying their pursuit of not just undocumented immigrants with criminal records, but also thousands of illegal immigrants who have been otherwise law-abiding.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, mostly convicted criminals, from January through mid-March, compared with 16,104 during the same period last year, according to statistics.
Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to 5,441, a development seen as the clearest sign yet that President Donald Trump has ditched his predecessor’s protective stance toward most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Advocates for immigrants say the unbridled enforcement has led to a sharp drop in reports from Latinos of sexual assaults and other crimes in Houston and Los Angeles and has terrified immigrant communities across the U.S. A prosecutor said the presence of immigration agents in state and local courthouses, which advocates say has increased under the Trump administration, makes it harder to prosecute crime.
“My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen,” Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state’s King County, said Thursday. “The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust.”
A spokeswoman for ICE said her agency “remains sensitive” to victims and witnesses and helps them obtain visas or stays of deportation in some cases. But she said anyone in the U.S. illegally could be deported.
The Post published the statistics as Mr. Kelly on Sunday defended plans to hire thousands of additional immigration and border-control agents.
He said the Trump administration’s lower bar on criminal behavior by undocumented immigrants merits a larger force, and he dismissed the idea that he’s creating a “deportation force.”
Nearly three-quarters of the immigrants arrested from Jan. 20 to March 13 had criminal convictions, an increase of 15 percent over the same period last year.
But the biggest spike is the arrest of immigrants with no criminal records, with immigration field offices in New York, Boston and other places doubling or tripling their numbers from last year.
ICE’s Atlanta office arrested the most immigrants who had never committed any crimes, with nearly 700 arrests, up from 137 the prior year. Philadelphia had the biggest percentage increase, with 356 noncriminal arrests, more than six times as many as the year before.
Overall, deportations are down by 1.2 percent, to 54,741 in January, February and March, compared with the same period last year. Ms. Elzea said it can take time to remove someone from the U.S., but the number of noncriminals deported is higher this year, while the number of criminals who were deported fell. Despite his pledge to send criminals packing, Mr. Trump has struggled to get countries such as China to take their citizens back.
Some say criticism of Mr. Trump’s policies seems politically charged, noting that former President Barack Obama deported thousands of immigrants without criminal records. And arrests this year are lower than Mr. Obama’s first weeks in 2014.