The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests

On March 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a press release about an “enhanced” operation that the agency had conducted the previous week in New Mexico. Forty-eight people were arrested in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Roswell, according to the government. Twenty of them had been “arrested or convicted of serious criminal offenses,” which included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and shoplifting. Others had committed “immigration violations such as illegal entry and illegal re-entry,” and twenty-one had final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. “These arrests,” a top ICE official said, “exemplify the type of criminals living among us.”

When ICE makes an arrest or stages a raid in New Mexico, Marcela Díaz, the executive director of Somos un Pueblo Unido, a Santa Fe-based advocacy organization, usually hears about it. “We organize in several rural communities, very tight-knit communities where everyone knows each other and knows their churches and neighbors,” she told me. “We have deep connections here.” A month into Donald Trump’s second term, two undocumented Guatemalan immigrants driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe were pulled over for a traffic violation. After an officer called ICE, they were transferred to federal custody. It took thirty-six hours for Díaz to find out about it. Forty-eight arrests—a substantial number in a state as small as New Mexico—should have generated a flood of calls to Somos un Pueblo Unido. A day passed, then two, but no one came forward with any information. “What normally happens when we see sweeps did not happen,” Díaz said.

Díaz had spent much of the week at the capitol with advocates from across the state to lobby legislators on two bills that would further restrict local law enforcement’s coöperation with federal immigration authorities. Neither passed, but conversations kept returning to the recent ICE operation. Were people too scared to come forward, even to trusted allies? Had the immigrants been deported in secret? Sophia Genovese is a managing attorney at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center; the lawyers at her office visit the state’s three ICE detention centers each week to meet with clients. The organization also has a “rapid-response team” with its own hotline. “We receive at least ninety-per-cent notice of all interior enforcement,” she told me. “When we have received referrals in the past, it’s been within one day. I was immediately suspicious. Something was not right here.”

During the Biden Administration, ICE had resumed a practice that had lapsed during Trump’s first Presidential term: a local agency liaison held regular meetings with officials and advocates to answer questions and respond to concerns. In January, Genovese told me, agency personnel had received strict instructions from Washington to cut off contact. This reflected a new hostility that went beyond simply ignoring local immigration attorneys. City and state representatives, including police chiefs and county sheriffs, were no longer being told about enforcement operations. When the office of Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, contacted ICE asking for more information about the March 12th press release—the kind of request to which ICE had typically responded in the past—it was rebuffed.

On March 16th, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with two oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “ICE has not identified any of the 48 individuals,” the letter said. “ICE has not indicated where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them.” (The Trump Administration has since shut down the two D.H.S. organizations, saying that “these offices have obstructed immigration enforcement” and “function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”)

The next day, a group of advocates gave a press conference at the capitol. Addressing the cameras, Rebecca Sheff, a senior attorney at the New Mexico A.C.L.U., said, “We don’t know what’s happened to these four dozen New Mexicans. They’ve effectively disappeared.” The weekend before, the Trump Administration had deported two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans to El Salvador, the majority of them, according to the government, under the Alien Enemies Act. Many were in the middle of immigration cases when they were put on planes to South Texas and then, despite a federal judge’s order, flown to a Salvadoran prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center. Some thought they were being returned to Venezuela. But their lawyers, along with the immigration judges in charge of their legal cases, had been kept in the dark.

“We have a robust immigrants’-rights community in New Mexico,” Díaz said. “We’ve been building it for decades. But something’s changing. How do we, as a movement, respond to it without knowing what’s going on?” She and her colleagues didn’t want to seem hyperbolic. “We chose our words carefully at the press conference,” she told me. “But we didn’t know what other words to use. These are disappearances.”

By the middle of March, the Trump Administration had claimed to have arrested nearly thirty-three thousand undocumented immigrants across the country. Trump has often said, without evidence, that the targets were criminals who threatened public safety. But shortly after he took office, under growing pressure on the agency to deliver on his promises of mass deportations, ICE officers were reportedly required to meet new arrest quotas each day, from a few hundred to between twelve and fifteen hundred nationwide. It was inevitable that immigrants without criminal records would get caught in the dragnet, including people with families and community ties who’ve lived in the country for decades.

The easiest immigrants to arrest tend to be those who are updating their legal papers and are already known to the government, or who have come into local ICE offices for routine check-ins. A Nicaraguan asylum seeker, who had been living in Washington with his family, was arrested three days after his monthly appointment. “I just don’t understand,” his wife told the Guardian. “Why would they want to arrest him now?” When a Colombian couple reported to an ICE office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one of them was taken into custody, while the other was told to return the following month. Other times, officers have made so-called collateral arrests, during an operation, picking up undocumented immigrants who hadn’t been identified as targets. In upstate New York, a mother and her three children, one of whom was in elementary school, were arrested and transferred to a detention center in Texas; the officers had encountered them while raiding a dairy farm in a village called Sackets Harbor, where they were looking for someone else. (After a thousand people held a protest—in a town of roughly fourteen hundred residents—the family was released.)

Of the two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans deported to El Salvador for alleged gang ties, in March, seventy-five per cent of them had no criminal history, according to an analysis by CBS News. The government refused to share information about the men. We know their identities only through the work of immigration attorneys and journalists. Mixed in among the Venezuelans, for instance, was Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man whose wife and son are U.S. citizens and who was supposed to be shielded from deportation by a judge’s order, issued in 2019. In a court filing first reported by The Atlantic, a Justice Department lawyer admitted that Abrego Garcia had been deported as a result of an administrative error. That lawyer has since been put on leave, the Times reported, for failing to “follow a directive from your superiors” and “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.” A federal judge ordered the Administration to bring Abrego Garcia back by midnight on April 8th. Instead, the government petitioned the Supreme Court to accept the argument that there’s little that it can do now that Abrego Garcia is in a foreign prison. (On Monday, hours before the deadline, the Court agreed to hear the case; on Thursday, it ordered the Administration to comply with the judge’s order and “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia to the U.S.)

In the past two and a half months, ICE has ended a long-standing policy discouraging arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals; its officers have also allegedly entered residences without warrants, arrested U.S. citizens by mistake, and refused to identify themselves while whisking people away on the streets of American cities. A Dominican man in the middle of a criminal trial in Boston was recently taken by an ICE officer and driven off in an unmarked car, prompting a municipal-court judge to hold the officer in contempt for “violating a defendant’s right to present at trial.” Last month, video footage captured ICE officers in plain clothes and face masks taking Rumeysa Ozturk, a thirty-year-old doctoral student at Tufts University, into custody, having revoked her visa apparently in response to an op-ed she co-wrote in the school paper. When officers in Manhattan arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate with a green card, Khalil’s wife, a U.S. citizen, asked them who they were. “We don’t give our name,” one of them replied. She then asked, in vain, “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?”