A December 28 Washington Post article is breathlessly headlined “ICE shift in tactics leads to soaring number of at-large arrests, data shows”. The paper attributes the rise to “a significant change in strategy” that’s part of “the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign”, but it ignores the elephant in the detention cell: so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions that won’t honor ICE detainers and bar the agency from their jails and prisons, forcing immigration officers onto the streets to find “the worst of the worst” criminal aliens. And that’s just one of the flaws in the Post’s reporting.
How Immigration Arrests Work
By way of background, here’s a quick recap of how immigration arrests work.
Section 236(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) permits immigration officers to arrest and detain aliens with an administrative warrant “pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States”.
Section 287(a)(2) of the INA, on the other hand, authorizes an immigration officer “to arrest any alien in the United States” without first obtaining a warrant “if he has reason to believe that the alien so arrested is in the United States in violation of any such law or regulation and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest”.
Regardless of whether it’s an arrest on warrant or a warrantless arrest, the immigration officer must first have “probable cause” that the individual is: (1) an alien; and (2) is inadmissible to the United States under section 212(a)(2) of the INA or deportable under section 237(a)(2) of the INA, i.e., “removable”.
To close the loop, as the Legal Information Institute explains: “Probable cause exists when the facts and circumstances within an officer’s knowledge would lead a reasonable person to believe that a crime has been committed”, or in this context that the individual is a removable alien.
Arrests on Warrant Are More Effective
Based upon my 30-plus years in immigration enforcement, it’s more effective, from a time and resource perspective, to arrest a given target in a specific place with a warrant, if for no other reason than the higher likelihood of an arrest (and there’s less after-the-fact paperwork).
When that arrest occurs in a public place, there is usually (though not always) a higher likelihood that the immigration officer will also find some other removable alien in the general vicinity of the target alien who will also be subject (formally, “amenable”) to arrest.
Those “other” aliens are referred to as “collateral arrests”, and here’s how they occur. The immigration officer has a warrant to go to, for example, a residence where the target resides with other individuals.
Once at the residence, the immigration officer is permitted (under section 287(a)(1) of the INA) to ask those other individuals about their status in the United States, and if they too are aliens who the officer has probable cause to believe are subject to removal and likely to flee, to arrest them as well.
You can substitute “residence” for “place of employment” or “random street-corner hangout” and see how it plays out in those venues as well.
Contrast that with an immigration enforcement “sweep” of a public place where removable aliens may congregate, like carwashes or home-improvement centers.
Maybe officers will find potential arrestees (and with proper intelligence, likely will), but it’s a crapshoot and, given that officers must spend additional time questioning potential targets to develop “reasonable suspicion” to stop them for a brief period for more questioning to determine if there is the probable cause for an arrest, it can all be a waste of time (and trigger needless litigation).
Jails and Prisons Are Safer Places than the Streets for Immigration Arrests
If arrests of removable aliens on a warrant are more effective, arrests of removable aliens on warrants in jails and prisons are safer for the officer, the alien, and the public at large.
The Post alludes to all these facts in its article, noting: “at-large arrests typically require more human and financial resources to carry out, immigration experts said. ICE’s website says that such arrests ‘are unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public.’”
What the paper doesn’t explain is why “at-large arrests . . . are unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public”, but fortunately the ICE website it linked to does. Here’s the full explanation:
When jails, prisons or other confinement facilities agree to honor immigration detainers, ICE officers can take custody of removable aliens in a safe, controlled environment instead of at-large in the community.
At-large arrests are unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public, aliens and federal law enforcement officers. It’s safer to assume custody of removable aliens in a secure, private environment.
You see, “jails, prisons, and other confinement facilities” all have one thing in common: those who enter are thoroughly searched to ensure they don’t have weapons target aliens can use to forcefully evade an immigration arrest.
The same isn’t true of residences, places of employment, or random street-corner hangouts. And it’s not just the target alien and the immigration officer who are imperiled: once knives are pulled, bullets fly, or baseball bats are brandished, they aren’t choosy about their destinations, and if the alien attempts to drive away, everybody in the vehicle’s path is in the crosshairs.
The Sanctuary Elephant in the Newsroom
Had the Post included that explanation (again, from an ICE website the paper linked) it would have raised the issue of how sanctuary policies force ICE to make the “at-large arrests” the article focuses on.
Again, some background. As the Center explains, “sanctuary jurisdictions” are:
cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.
Most sanctuaries claim that complying with ICE requests will make it less likely that victims in immigrant communities will come forward and/or that immigration enforcement is a federal duty and therefore unworthy of state and local resources.
The Center examined the former claim in 2021 and found no evidence to support it, while the second is short-sighted in the extreme.
As I have explained elsewhere, the thing all criminals have in common is they are likely to reoffend, meaning sanctuary authorities’ refusal to cooperate with ICE will probably result in additional local victims and the expenditure of more resources to catch, detain, prosecute, and incarcerate repeat alien offenders who could otherwise have been deported.
Even if you believe that most unauthorized immigrants aren’t any more likely to commit crimes than the general population (an unverifiable contention one way or the other), criminal aliens, like all criminals, are more likely to commit future crimes.
Moreover, when they refuse to honor ICE detainers and deny the agency access to their “safe, controlled” jails and prisons, sanctuary jurisdictions force immigration officers out on the street to make those “unpredictable and dangerous” arrests of criminal aliens that are the focus of the Post article.
But here’s how the Post article begins: “The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has led to a significant change in strategy, as federal officers shift away from focusing on arresting immigrants already held in local jails to tracking them down on the streets and in communities”.
“Federal officers” can’t “shift away from focusing on arresting immigrants already held in local jails” if they weren’t allowed into those jails to begin with. That’s not a “change in strategy”; it’s accepting reality and an adjustment based on facts on the ground.
Look at the cities the Post highlights: “Los Angeles; Boston; . . . and Chicago”. What do they have in common? They all have strict sanctuary policies; maybe someone should point that out.
And yet the Post almost makes it seem like ICE is conducting more at-large arrests to make its officers’ job more difficult.
Respectfully, an article about a “soaring number of at-large” immigration arrests that never mentions the impact of sanctuary policies on immigration enforcement is like a review of “Star Wars” that fails to discuss Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Wookiees, or “the Force”. But that’s the Nothingburger the Post served up for its readers.
The Purported Increase in Non-Criminal ICE Arrestees
Apparently not content with telling just half a story about ICE’s “soaring number of at-large arrests”, the Post then shifts to complaining that “the number of people without a criminal record arrested by ICE since June nearly tripled, according to The Post’s analysis” of data compiled by a group called the “Deportation Data Project”.
You can click on a link the Post includes in its article to see what that group is all about, but in any event its data pile is massive, containing (for example) information on 377,068 ICE arrests between September 2023 and October 16, 2025.
I trust the Post when it says it analyzed that data, but to the degree it only examined the differences between arrested aliens with criminal charges and convictions and those without criminal records, it misses a third, crucial cohort of ICE arrestees: non-criminal aliens with final orders of removal.
Section 241(a)(2)(A) of the INA requires DHS to detain aliens under final orders of removal, and a quick glance at the Deportation Data Project information shows plenty of “other immigration violator” (i.e., “non-criminal”) aliens who were arrested with final removal orders (including, at line 376961, a Guatemalan national with a reinstated order from 1994, and at line 376996, a Honduran national with a reinstated order dated August 2025).
Congress doubled down on that section 241(a)(2)(A) detention mandate in January when it passed S. 5, the “Laken Riley Act”, but the Post either doesn’t realize Congress has made such arrests of non-criminal aliens ordered removed non-negotiable or it doesn’t care.
“Detention Management”
That said, I’m not sure why the paper opted to review those reams of data from an independent group when ICE publishes a current total of its detainees on its “Detention Management” website.
And it shows that ICE has 56,393 aliens in its detention who were arrested by the agency in the interior (as opposed to migrants encountered by CBP at the borders and ports), nearly 57.8 percent of whom have either criminal convictions (29.7 percent) or arrests (28.1 percent).
The remaining 42.2 percent are “other immigration violators”, but again ICE does not break those aliens down into pre-order and post-order cases.
That hardly sounds like an agency on a mission to only arrest “otherwise law-abiding noncitizens” or whatever term you prefer, but nonetheless the Post contends that:
Nearly half of the 79,000 people ICE arrested and placed in detention between Oct. 1 and the end of November did not have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, according to separate government data obtained by The Post. (Those arrests included CBP arrests, which make up a small percentage of the total.)
Currently, ICE has 12,049 CBP arrestees in its custody, 18 percent of its total detention count of 68,442 – hardly a “small percentage of the total” – but even if you add them, less than half (48 percent) of ICE detainees have no criminal record.
I guess 48 percent is “nearly half”, but still the whole analysis seems a little disingenuous.
“Seven in 10 ICE Arrests under Trump Have Criminal Histories”
Congress in the INA doesn’t distinguish between removable criminal aliens and “other immigration violators”; it requires DHS to remove everyone here illegally, and to quote Barbara Jordan circa 1994: “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”
That’s indisputable, but as I have explained in the past, the “criminal/non-criminal” dichotomy was created under Obama in March 2011; if you want to understand why the unauthorized population soared to 15.4 million by January 2025, look no further.
That said, the Post’s analysis as a whole is at odds with a different article published in the Washington Examiner two days earlier headlined “Seven in 10 ICE arrests under Trump have criminal histories”.
The author, Anna Giaritelli, didn’t rely on statistics compiled by the Deportation Data Project; she went to her sources at DHS, and reported that of “595,000 illegal immigrants between Jan. 20 and Dec. 11 . . . 70%, or about 416,000, have ‘criminal convictions or pending criminal charges just in the U.S.’”.
To be clear, when I say “the Post’s analysis as a whole is at odds with” the Examiner piece, the Post did (in paragraph 16) quote DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin as stating that “70 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States and that some have convictions or charges in their home countries”.
But the Post left McLaughlin’s statement hanging there as it launched into an analysis of the Deportation Data Project’s information that was all over the place: “from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, through Oct. 15 about 36 percent of ICE detainees had criminal convictions and 30 percent had pending charges”; “[s]ince September, more than 40 percent of those arrested by ICE had no criminal records”; “[n]early half of the 79,000 people ICE arrested and placed in detention between Oct. 1 and the end of November did not have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges”. (Emphasis added.)
In the middle of FY 2021, when I was largely alone in highlighting the descent of the border into chaos, I relied almost exclusively on the federal government’s own statements and statistics, because no matter how hard they try, outside organizations can never obtain the entire universe of pertinent information.
And for now, I’d take McLaughlin at her word – but I will still keep looking at the official numbers.
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Regardless of how you parse the figures, ICE is targeting criminal aliens. It would rather to do that in “controlled environments” like jails and prisons, but sanctuary policies prevent officers in many places from going there, forcing them into riskier “at-large” arrests on the street and in communities. Consider that analysis my attempt to put some meat into the Washington Post’s December 28 Nothingburger.