ICE admits to 1,300 'collateral' arrests amid Trump's fumbling mass deportation operation
On the morning of Feb. 13, a 52-year-old man from Ecuador was in a car with four people when the driver noticed they were being followed by a white van and pulled over into an elementary school parking lot, according to a petition filed to challenge the 52-year-old’s immigration detention.
A plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent then approached the car and said that agents were looking for someone named Helen. After he reviewed their identification, multiple ICE agents detained three of the passengers, including the 52-year-old man. None of them were named Helen.
The man’s arrest appears to be one of 1,300 arrests during Operation Metro Surge labeled as “collateral” by ICE in a new release of ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. The labeling of arrests as either “targeted” or “collateral,” which was not included in previous data releases, offers new insight into how many people were not the intended target of immigration enforcement during the surge of 3,000 federal agents but were nonetheless caught in the Trump administration’s mass deportation dragnet.
The data doesn’t name the individuals arrested, but it does include information like time of arrest, birth year, citizenship country and how long a person was detained for, which the Reformer used to match the Ecuadorian man’s arrest, described in court records, to an arrest in the new data release.
ICE didn’t challenge any of the facts in the habeas petition, and the man was ordered by a judge to be released from detention four days later. He was released from custody the next day, according to both the Deportation Data Project’s detention data and court records.
ICE did not respond to a request for the definition of “collateral,” but in a previous email, ICE said about the data: “The Deportation Data Project relies on information releases that have not been reviewed, audited or given context. Neither DHS or ICE have verified the accuracy, methodology or the analysis of the project and its results. The bottom line is that the Deportation Data Project is not accurate.”
The Deportation Data Project publishes data obtained from the agency via a Freedom of Information Act request and is the most comprehensive data available on ICE arrests during the surge. Despite challenging the accuracy of the data it provided, ICE has yet to offer an alternative.
Collateral arrests make up around 35% of the 3,785 arrests recorded since the beginning of the surge in December. The portion of arrests that were collateral nearly doubled during the surge compared to previous months: From September to November, around 19% of the 528 arrests recorded in Minnesota were collateral.
In the first two weeks of the surge, federal immigration agents recorded more collateral arrests than targeted arrests.
It’s still unclear how reliable the label is. On Jan. 14, ICE agents mistook Alfredo Aljorna, a Venezuelan national, for another Latino man and pursued him on I-94. After the car chase, an ICE agent shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Federal agents detained Aljorna and Sosa-Celis, along with their partners and a man who lives in the same duplex.
None of the arrested people were the intended target of the ICE agents, but in the data, the arrest of a Venezuelan man whose age, arrest time and detention details matches Aljorna’s is labeled as “targeted.” The arrest of a man who appears to be Sosa-Celis is labeled as “collateral.” The remaining arrests do not clearly match any of the arrests in the data.
The data doesn’t include the arrests of U.S. citizens. Operation Metro Surge was initially purported to target Somali Minnesotans, the vast majority of whom are citizens. Agents mistook citizens for their targets and appeared to arrest citizens on the basis of their appearance; a federal judge in Minnesota found “compelling and troubling” evidence that federal agents racially profiled Somali and Latino residents.