White House Touts Arrests of Violent Migrants, but Trump’s Crackdown Is Much Broader

Just a few minutes after he had left home for work, Lucas Dos Santos Amaral was stopped by immigration officers near his home in Marlborough, Mass. The officers told him the name of someone they were looking for, and said the man looked like him.

The Brazilian doesn’t have a criminal history or orders for removal from a judge, his lawyer said, meaning he doesn’t have the type of background the Trump administration laid out as its priority for deportation.

Dos Santos Amaral, 29, identified himself to assure officers he wasn’t who they were looking for. The officers looked him up and learned that he was overstaying a tourist visa from 2017, according to his lawyer, his wife and a state legislator helping with his case. Dos Santos Amaral was arrested and detained on the spot and eventually was moved to a detention center in Texas—without the knowledge of his lawyer or family.

Immigration officers are under immense pressure to ramp up arrest numbers as the administration tries to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of a mass deportation. The result is the administration, despite largely promoting arrests of criminals, has been detaining a number of migrants, like Dos Santos Amaral, who don’t have criminal backgrounds or orders for removal, according to interviews with immigration lawyers, activists, state and local officials and families of migrants arrested.

Living in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation subject to deportation but it isn’t a criminal offense.

Overall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 20,000 migrants living in the U.S. illegally in the first month of the Trump administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Arrests are on pace to more than double the 113,000 arrests ICE made under President Joe Biden in fiscal year 2024.

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ICE initially provided daily arrest numbers with a breakdown of how many being deported had committed crimes, but stopped after the first few days. On the highest day for arrests that ICE disclosed, roughly half of those picked up by immigration officers had a criminal background.

Senior ICE officials told subordinates after Trump’s first week as president that the agency’s offices are each responsible for 75 arrests a day, or roughly 1,000-1,500 arrests a day across the country.

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Immigration officers have used aggressive tactics, including going to schools and dressing in plainclothes while making arrests, and their targets have been unusual, lawyers, activists and migrant families say. Administration officials have described arrests of non-criminals as “collaterals,” but in many cases, immigration officers have also been racially profiling and specifically asking for migrants who don’t have criminal backgrounds or orders for removal, immigration lawyers said.

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Didier Melendez was dropping his co-worker off at a check-in appointment with ICE in Little Rock, Ark., last week when officers came downstairs to say they had detained his friend—and wanted to see his papers, too. Melendez said he told the officers he was a DACA recipient and in any case was married to a U.S. citizen who is in the process of sponsoring him for a Green Card.

The officers handcuffed Melendez’s wrists and ankles and brought him upstairs. Technically, Melendez’s DACA protections—which must be renewed every two years—had lapsed a week earlier, and though he had applied for a renewal in the fall, the government still hadn’t processed it. Melendez, now 35 years old, also had an old deportation order from when he was 13 years old and his parents didn’t take him to a required court hearing.

The officers told him that, given he had no protections at that moment, they could deport him that day if they wanted to. They ultimately decided to release him because he hadn’t had any previous run-ins with the law {snip}

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Melendez’s lawyer, Lily Axelrod, said it is unusual for ICE to arrest or detain DACA recipients.

Rosa Barreca, a Philadelphia-based immigration attorney, said in two decades of working in law and immigration services, she didn’t see the types of ICE arrests she has been seeing in recent weeks, including that of a Colombian man from Toms River, N.J., who had a pending asylum case.

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