More than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in D.C. during the surge in federal law enforcement this year had no prior criminal record, newly released federal data shows, even though that crackdown was portrayed as targeting violent crime.
President Donald Trump cast the “crime emergency” he declared on Aug. 11 as an effort to root out the worst criminal offenders in a city under siege.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump announced as he deployed the National Guard, ordered hundreds of federal law enforcement officers to patrol city streets and prompted his administration to take over the city’s police department.
The crackdown led to a steep surge in immigration arrests, including many carried out without warrants — a practice that a federal judge said this week probably violated the law.
More than 1,100 people in the District were picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from the day the “crime emergency” went into effect through mid-October. That is more than triple the amount of ICE arrests in D.C. during the first seven months of the year.
But during that period there was more than a sixfold increase in arrests of immigrants without any criminal record at all, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data obtained through an ongoing public-records request by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California at Berkeley.
From Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 through Aug. 10, ICE arrested 143 people in the District with no criminal record, the data shows. During the two-month period following the start of Trump’s crime emergency, that number shot up to 932 arrests.
The Deportation Data Project figures do not reflect whether those taken into custody by ICE were in violation of an order of removal, which would make them subject to arrest under federal law. They also do not include immigration arrests carried out by Customs and Border Protection or other federal officers.
Nithya Nathan-Pineau, a policy attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in D.C., said that the data proves what her organization and other immigrant rights’ groups had long suspected: ICE was not being selective about who it arrested during the surge.
“If their stated purpose was to address violent crime or public safety, you would think they would focus on people who have been doing things that would endanger public safety,” she said. “These were indiscriminate enforcement actions going after any person who appeared to be an immigrant. … What’s motivating them is just sheer numbers.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security disputed the data, though both claimed the influx of federal law enforcement was a success.
“The focus of President Trump’s highly successful D.C. operation has been to address crime committed by anyone, regardless of immigration status,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. She did not answer questions about why so many immigrants with no criminal records were arrested.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said some of those arrested without criminal convictions or pending criminal charges are wanted for violent crimes outside the United States. In a statement, she pointed to a handful of such cases across the country, including one man arrested in March in Maryland who is wanted for aggravated homicide in El Salvador.
The sharp increase in arrests of people with no criminal record in D.C. appears to be part of a broader national trendin the first year of Trump’s second administration.
In Chicago, for instance, Border Patrol agents have deployed aggressive tactics to round up more than 4,000 people, only a few of whom have major criminal records. In Los Angeles, most people arrested by federal agents had never been charged with or convicted of a crime.
In D.C., federal agents have continued patrolling the city in masks and tactical gear after Trump’s crime emergency officially ended in September.
In some cases, ICE agents have partnered with other law enforcement officers or local police to stop people for minor traffic violations, including moped drivers and work crews inside landscaping trucks, and then arrest them. In other cases, agents have executed warrants or randomly stopped people on the street in early-morning incidents that drew crowds of people shouting and filming those arrests.
In a ruling on Tuesday, a federal judge in D.C. criticized the administration’s use of “reasonable suspicion” as the basis for its enforcement efforts when granting a preliminary injunction that limits warrantless immigration arrests in the city.
The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that prompted the ruling is José Escobar Molina, a 47-year-old Salvadoran man who was arrested in D.C. during the surge — despite having temporary protected status that bars him from being deported.
As Escobar Molina was walking to his work truck on Aug. 21, a group of unidentified federal agents arrested him without a warrant and without asking for his name or identification, the lawsuit said.
Escobar Molina told them he had papers, the lawsuit claims, but the agents did not listen. Instead, they repeatedly responded: “You are illegal,” according to the lawsuit.
He was taken to an ICE processing facility in Northern Virginia and held overnight before an agency supervisor realized he had temporary protected status and released him, the suit said.
Data shows that more than 98 percent of those arrested since the D.C. takeover began were men, mostly people in their late 20s to mid-40s.
Christian Carías Torres, 33, was also one of them.
A moped delivery driver from Venezuela, he entered the U.S. in 2023 through a Biden-era program that let him into the country as he applied for asylum. His claim was denied about six months later, and he said he chose not to appeal it.
Carías Torres said he was making good money delivering lattes and burritos around the D.C. area for UberEats — often as much as $1,000 a week — but the stress and danger of the job zooming around in traffic, freezing weather or punishing heat for 14 hours a day were wearing on him.
By the time Trump ordered hundreds of federal officers to patrol the city, Carías Torres had begun planning for a return to South America once he could save more money. “I’m going to focus with Faith to accomplish it,” he text messaged his cousin that week.
On a sticky Saturday in late August, Carías Torres was again motoring around on his Fly Wing scooter when he got an order to pick up iced drinks from a cafe in Northwest Washington. As he carried them outside, six federal officials — one of them flashing a badge for ICE — tackledhim and put him in handcuffs before taking him into custody.
“It was brutal,” Carías Torres later said, noting he resisted at first but did not hit back. “It’s ugly for them to treat you that way.”
After video of the arrest went viral online, McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, called Carías Torres a “suspected gang member” without offering evidence and said he had an open warrant for reckless driving charges in Maryland after repeatedly failing to appear in court.
She did not respond to questions seeking specific case numbers, but The Post independently located Maryland court records that show Carías Torres received traffic tickets for three incidents in late 2023 and early 2024 in which he, among other infractions, allegedly drove without insurance and without a helmet and failed to properly provide his license and registration when police asked.
Carías Torres was fined hundreds of dollars, records show, but there were no outstanding warrants connected to the traffic citations and no criminal charges. After his arrest in August, he was charged for assault on an officer — which was later dismissed — before being transferred to multiple immigrant detention centers and deported to Venezuela.
“They think we’re all delinquents, but so many of us are just focused on working,” Carías Torres said during a phone interview from Bogotá, Colombia.
The increased immigration enforcement in D.C. also disproportionately affected Guatemalans, though it’s not clear why. That population represented a third of all arrests in the District in the period since the surge began, though they are estimated to represent less then 5 percent of the total immigrant population in the D.C. metropolitan area.
Tanya Golash-Boza, a D.C.-based sociologist at the University of California who has studied deportations to Guatemala, speculated that a heavy Guatemalan presence in certain industries like construction could have made them easier targets for enforcement.
But she also pointed to a Supreme Court ruling this year that lifted limits on immigration raids in the Los Angeles area. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that race can be a “relevant factor” to consider alongside other information to stop someone for an immigration check.
The opinion “says that you can tell whether someone is undocumented based on what they look like,” Golash-Boza said. “It’s based on a stereotype and for many people, a lot of Guatemalans fit that stereotype — even if the stereotype is incorrect.”
Katie Mettler and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff contributed to this report.
MethodologyThe Post relied on data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which details individual arrests made by the federal agency. The data was acquired and made publicly available by the Deportation Data Project, which collects and releases immigration enforcement data.The arrest data includes duplicate records. Reporters dropped identical arrest records for individual people, filtering out more than 5,000 records and working with more than 98 percent of the data.
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