Throughout the (ongoing, nine-week long) DHS funding shutdown, the department has been slow to release key data, but ICE did recently update its statistics on alien arrests and detentions. Those stats suggest a “Minneapolis effect”, that is a negative impact on interior ICE activity following the death of protestor Alex Pretti during an immigration enforcement operation in the Twin City in late January. How long that impact lingers, and how ICE responds to it, will determine whether DHS meets its “bold” arrest and removal targets for FY 2026.
Immigration Enforcement During the First 14 Months of Trump II
Promises to reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s lackadaisical immigration enforcement policies were key to Donald Trump’s presidential electoral victory in November 2024, and the president returned after a four-year interregnum with a clear mandate to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Prior to his second inauguration, Trump nominated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) to be his DHS secretary, and the now-Republican-led senate confirmed Noem five days after the president returned.
Noem ramped up immigration enforcement in the interior, augmenting ICE officers and resources with agents from other federal agencies, notably CBP Border Patrol agents.
The agency and its federal partners thereafter launched massive street-level enforcement operations in major cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and eventually Minneapolis, where Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and Mayor Jacob Frey (D) seized on the issue to rile up opposition to Trump, not infrequently in inflammatory terms.
Protests — often violent — followed, but Noem and then-El Centro Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, whom the secretary had named “commander at large” of enforcement operations, remained defiant.
The deaths of two protesters during immigration operations in Minnesota, Renee Good in early January 2026 and Pretti 17 days later, turned up the heat, and the White House quickly responded by moving Bovino out of the state and sending “Border Czar” Tom Homan to Minneapolis days after Pretti’s death to calm the waters with local officials.
Homan — a longtime ICE official — quickly abandoned the confrontational street operations that marked Noem and Bovino’s enforcement efforts and returned the agency to more traditional enforcement activities, largely focused on in-custody arrests of criminal aliens in state and local facilities and the targeting of identified aliens at their residences and places of work.
Homan replaced Noem as the face of immigration enforcement, and by March 5 she was out as DHS secretary, replaced by then-Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a one-time plumber and pugilist who nonetheless promised a less confrontational tone than his predecessor.
The Decline in Interior Arrests
As I’ve explained in the past, two key metrics define DHS’s effectiveness in reducing the number of aliens illegally present in the United States: ICE arrests of removable aliens in the United States (“interior arrests”); and its deportations of aliens living in the United States (as opposed to entering at the border), also known as “interior removals”.
An unassuming ICE web page, “Detention Management”, explains in clinical terms that the agency is responsible for all civil immigration detentions, and describes which aliens it holds and why.
The text has been largely unchanged for years, but a series of Excel spreadsheets at the bottom of that page under the header “Detention Statistics” are, by law, updated every couple of weeks to reflect the number of aliens ICE is currently detaining, as well as the number it has detained in prior years, and who have been removed by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate.
If you go to the most recent spreadsheet and click over to the third tab, “Detention FY26”, you can find the most recent stats, including one box marked “ICE Initial Book-Ins by Arresting Agency and Month: FY2026”.
It reveals that through the first few days of April, ICE took custody of just over 230,000 aliens since the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1, fewer than 23,400 of whom were originally encountered by CBP at the borders and the ports; and more than 207,000 of whom came into the agency’s custody after ICE interior arrests.
Note that ICE has already made 128 percent more interior arrests in just the first half-plus of FY 2026 than it did in all of FY 2024 (90,615), the last full fiscal year of the Biden-Harris administration.
That said, ICE monthly book-ins of aliens arrested by ERO officers in the interior this fiscal year have dipped sharply of late, falling to just over 29,600 in March from nearly 38,000 in December, a 21.7-plus percent decline over that three-month period.
“The Minneapolis Effect”
The term “the Minneapolis Effect” was coined to describe “the decline in proactive policing” in response to the backlash that followed the death of George Floyd in local police custody in that city in May 2020. (Similar to the earlier “Ferguson Effect” in St. Louis following the 2014 death of Michael Brown.)
One could argue the (often violent and confrontational) public response to immigration enforcement between December and January in Minneapolis was a lingering hangover of those riots, but regardless the latest ICE detention management statistics suggest there has been a similar decline in “proactive” immigration enforcement following the deaths of Good and Pretti.
Again — monthly ICE interior arrests under Trump II remain significantly higher than they were under Biden-Harris — but as I recently noted, the congressional budget justification (CBJ) ICE recently sent to congress had a target of 400,000 criminal alien arrests and one million removals in FY 2026.
As per the latest Detention Management statistics, ICE has removed fewer than 235,000 aliens this fiscal year, and while (as noted) the agency has made 207,000 interior arrests, it’s unclear how many involved aliens with criminal arrests and convictions.
Most ICE removals follow an interior arrest (some aliens under final orders self-report), meaning the agency must expand its enforcement efforts or risk falling well short of its ambitious goals in the CBJ.
My colleague (and boss) Mark Krikorian has proposed replacing the street-level “body armor enforcement” that was a hallmark of Noem and Bovino’s alien arrest schemes with expanded “worksite enforcement” (or as he termed it, “briefcase enforcement”), which targets both removable aliens and shady employers at their places of employment.
That proposal was echoed in a “playbook” recently published by the enforcement hawks in the Mass Deportation Coalition (MDC), which itself demands a minimum of one million removals per annum.
MDC polling reveals that 70 percent of respondents favored “strengthening workplace immigration enforcement to help raise wages for American workers”, suggesting a properly implemented, beefed-up worksite plan could garner popular support while boosting ICE’s interior arrest and removal efforts.
Past Could Be Prologue — If Trump II Allows It to Be
As I explained to the Washington Post in early March: “Most Americans favor immigration enforcement. They just don’t want to see or hear much about it.”
In that vein, and given most worksite arrests occur within workplaces, ICE could expand its operations there while largely avoiding the publicity and face-to-face confrontations with protesters that marked (and marred) its street-level arrest strategy under the late DHS regime.
There is significant precedent for using worksite enforcement as the main tool for interior immigration enforcement. As the MDC playbook explains:
Congress added the employer sanctions provisions in section 274A to the INA in the same bill that included the “Reagan amnesty,” the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Ironically, however, in the years after the passage of that bill, arrests of illegal aliens at worksites plummeted.
MDC specifically references a 1984 Supreme Court opinion wherein the justices noted:
In the course of a year, the average [then-Immigration and Naturalization Service] agent arrests almost 500 illegal aliens. ... Most arrests of illegal aliens away from the border occur during farm, factory, or other workplace surveys. Large numbers of illegal aliens are often arrested at one time. [Emphasis added.]
Immigration enforcement past could be key to ICE meeting its target of one million removals per year, provided the agency augments its in-custody arrests of criminal aliens with expanded “briefcase enforcement” at worksites. The original “Minneapolis Effect” hobbled local cops and fostered lawlessness; it needn’t have a similar deleterious impact on immigration enforcement.