WASHINGTON — Detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants spiked right after President Donald Trump assumed office in January, but they have since slowed, belying the president’s promise that millions of immigrants would be quickly removed from the United States.
That’s not to say that the administration’s chaotic approach to enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws has not resulted in widespread removals of immigrants.
But the Trump administration is facing hurdles, including a lack of detention centers and the logistics of transporting people across the globe, and that has frustrated Trump, who has repeatedly said the pace of arrests and deportations should be higher.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says that in the first 50 days of the Trump administration, it made 32,809 arrests. While many of those apprehended were promptly deported, a majority are in detention centers awaiting removal or, if they have legal recourse, a court date.
According to ICE, arrests across the nation peaked at 872 people per day in late January before falling to just under 600 people per day in the first three weeks of February.
That’s a significant increase in activity. Last year, during the Biden administration, ICE arrested and detained about 255 people each day.
Arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border, whose security has been enhanced by U.S. military troops, are down. So much of the immigration enforcement activity has shifted inland to states like Minnesota.
Unlike the numbers of arrests, the actual pace of deportations is difficult to determine, both across the nation and in Minnesota, frustrating immigration advocates.
ICE did not respond to requests for information on how many people were deported from Minnesota last month, or how many were removed so far this month.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a University of Syracuse project, only 20 migrants were deported from Minnesota in 2024.
But there’s recent anecdotal evidence, including a workplace raid at an aluminum finishing plant in St. Louis Park that reportedly resulted in eight arrests and another five arrests of a roofing crew in Duluth, which shows that federal immigration enforcement in the state has increased sharply.
“We have also seen them picked up at other locations, including traffic stops, courthouses and on the streets,” said Robyn Mayer-Thompson, a staff attorney at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Alicia Granse, a staff attorney with the ACLU-Minnesota, said conversations with other immigration attorneys have led her to believe that detention centers in the state that are under contract with ICE are crowded with new detainees.
Detained immigrants in Minnesota are processed at local ICE offices at St. Paul-based Fort Snelling, but they cannot be held at that facility and are taken to three county jails — one each in Kandiyohi, Freeborn and Sherburne counties — before they are deported.
Granse said one reason there were fewer deportations in Minnesota before Trump came back into power was because many of those detained came from countries that would not accept them or were considered unsafe places for immigrants to be returned to.
“That has changed,” Granse said.
For instance, Trump secretly signed a proclamation last week invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, saying he would quickly remove Venezuelans aged 14 and over who allegedly belong to the Tren de Aragua gang.
Those Venezuelans, whose country of origin would not accept them, and about 100 Salvadorans were flown to El Salvador this weekend, even after a federal judge told the administration to turn back the plane.
Trump’s so-called border czar, Tom Homan, said the administration planned to continue such deportations despite the court’s order.
“We’re not stopping,” he said Monday on Fox News. “I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”
Filled to capacity
Another reason more immigrants in Minnesota are being detained by ICE is that Congress has approved, and Trump has signed into law, the Laken Riley Act, which shifted a long-established ICE priority of arresting violent criminals to arresting any immigrant convicted or even just accused of a crime, even if it’s minor theft.
“Somebody who is suspected of shoplifting diapers could be arrested,” Granse said. “The narrative from the administration is that they are deporting violent criminals and that’s just not true.”
Many of the people deported have not been convicted or accused of any crime, she said.
And the administration is not just deporting the undocumented. Trump has stripped the temporary protected status designation that allowed immigrants to live and worked provisionally in the United States from Venezuelans and is expected to do so from immigrants from other countries, including Ukraine and Haiti.
But the Trump administration is facing hurdles as it tries to carry out its promise to deport millions of immigrants.
In a call to reporters last week, a senior ICE official said detention centers were filled to capacity with 47,600 detainees and that the Trump administration is seeking more bed space.
But that will take money, much more than the $500 million increase in the budget that was approved for federal immigration operations in a short-term spending bill by Congress last week.
Michele Waslin, assistant director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota, said Trump himself caused one problem for his effort to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history: he fired some immigration judges.“If the courts are slow to issue final deportation orders, that impacts the number of people deported,” Waslin said.
Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.
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