ICE arrests fell after a high-profile shake-up in Minnesota, according to an analysis of federal enforcement records shared with UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and reviewed by the Associated Press. The change came in the weeks after the Minneapolis killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration officers in late January, which added scrutiny to the government’s aggressive immigration tactics. After a Feb. 4 drawdown announcement by Tom Homan, ICE arrest counts across the country dropped on average even as the pace remained uneven by state.
The AP analysis traced the shift to the period after Homan took over oversight in the Twin Cities. It compared weekly arrest totals from the five weeks before Homan’s Feb. 4 announcement with the next five weeks of data. In the earlier window, ICE averaged 8,347 weekly arrests nationwide, the AP said. In the later window, ICE averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide.
At the peak of the crackdown that preceded the shift, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hit nearly 40,000 nationwide in December and were nearly as high the next month, the AP said. During that phase, tactical enforcement was visible in Minneapolis, where carloads of masked immigration officers were a common sight, while arrests were also occurring at high levels in places including Texas, Florida and California, the AP said. In the weeks after the Minneapolis killings and the official shake-up that followed, ICE arrests dropped on average by nearly 12% nationwide.
The Minnesota changes reflected a broader command reshuffle after the Minneapolis killings. The AP said Gregory Bovino—described as the public face of the administration’s crackdown, including through his “Turn and burn” description of the strategy—was pushed aside after the killings of Good and Alex Pretti. The AP said Border czar Tom Homan was then sent to the Twin Cities to chart a new course for immigration enforcement, and that he announced the drawdown of immigration agents in Minnesota on Feb. 4.
While nationwide totals fell after Feb. 4, the AP analysis found the numbers did not move in the same direction everywhere. ICE arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida in the five weeks that followed Homan’s announcement, in some cases reaching their highest weekly count since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to the AP. In Kentucky alone, the AP said weekly arrests more than doubled, reaching 86 by early March. Those increases were offset, the AP said, by steep drops in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.
The AP analysis also looked at who ICE was arresting during both windows. The Trump administration has portrayed its operations as targeting the most serious criminals living illegally in the United States, and the president has referred to them as “the worst of the worst,” the AP said. But the AP reported that many of the people taken into ICE custody had no criminal history. Nationally, the AP said about 46% of the people ICE arrested in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no criminal charges or convictions; that share fell to 41% in the five weeks that followed.
Even with that drop, the AP said the post-drawdown period still showed a relatively high share of arrests involving people with no criminal charges or convictions. The AP said that share remained above a 35% weekly average for the time since Trump returned to office. In addition, the AP said that in some states, the proportion of noncriminals arrested rose, rather than declined, after Feb. 4.
Court filings offered another view of enforcement activity even as arrests appeared to soften in the enforcement-data analysis. The AP said federal court cases provide an imperfect window into how deportation tactics remained active even if overall arrest numbers had waned. Among the examples the AP cited were a Feb. 22 arrest in a suburban San Diego traffic stop of a 21-year-old Honduran man who, according to a petition, had no criminal record and is the father of three U.S. citizen children. The AP also cited a case involving a 33-year-old Venezuelan woman described as a well-known South Texas doctor, arrested earlier in the month with her five-year-old U.S.-citizen daughter on her way to her husband’s asylum hearing; officials, the AP reported, said she was arrested for overstaying her visa.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told the AP that the lower arrest and detention numbers suggested possible change but warned it was too early to conclude whether the shifts were permanent. In remarks to the AP, Reichlin-Melnick said, “The Trump administration says: ‘We’re not slowing down,’ ‘Nothing has changed,’” and added that it was “very clear that they have pulled back from some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” a Minneapolis crackdown that swept the city.