At the peak of the crackdown, carloads of masked immigration officers were a common sight in the streets of Minneapolis, meanwhile thousands of people were being arrested every week down in Texas, Florida and California. The top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino called their strategy a relentless display of force. Teams of agents were descending on restaurant kitchens, bus stops, and Home Depot parking lots. Back in December arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement peaked at nearly 40,000 nationwide and were almost just as high in the next month.
Later into January the killings that happened in Minneapolis of two American citizens by ICE officers started to grow concern over the government’s tactics which led to a shake up of the Immigration officials. In the weeks that followed after that their arrests dropped nearly 12%. According to polls they took in Minneapolis ICE went too far which may have been a factor of the firing of Kristi Noem in early March. An AP analysis of ICE arrest records show the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan’s drawdown announcement, , the most recent period for which data is available, down from 8,347 per week in the previous five weeks.
Those arrest numbers were still higher on average than during much of the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, and were dramatically higher than during the Biden administration. ICE arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases hitting their highest weekly count since the start of Trump’s second term Those increases were offset by steep drops in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.
The Trump administration insists it is targeting the most vicious criminals living illegally in the U.S., and the president has referred to them as “the worst of the worst.” In some cases the description is accurate, but the reality is complicated. Many of the toughest criminals taken into ICE custody were already in prison, but many others who were arrested have no criminal history. Nationally, some 46% of the people ICE arrested in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no criminal charges or convictions, dropping to 41% in the five weeks that followed.
