A man from El Salvador was stopped for allegedly driving a landscaping truck through federal parkland. A Honduran man was pulled over when the police said he ran a stop sign as his family left a local park. A Jordanian man was detained while working in a food truck on the National Mall during a crackdown on unlicensed vendors.
President Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement officers in August across Washington — intended, officials said, to lower crime — transformed what was one of the largest sanctuary cities in the country into a test case for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it expands its efforts in major urban centers.
The agency sharply increased its arrests in the city by working alongside the local police and other federal agencies to identify immigrants during stops for minor traffic violations, according to law enforcement officials, lawyers for detained migrants, internal immigration records and witness accounts.
ICE had made only 85 arrests in Washington from Jan. 20 through the end of July, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. But from early August until mid-September, ICE made around 1,200 arrests, according to officials with knowledge of the data.
One key to the strategy: ICE’s close partnership with both the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Park Police, according to a New York Times review of dozens of videos filmed by witnesses in Washington. At other times, the agency operated alone, with masked officers detaining people in sometimes aggressive encounters that drew angry protests from neighbors.
Last week, an immigrants rights organization sued the Department of Homeland Security, accusing the agency of targeting people for their ethnicity, making arrests without probable cause and sowing “terror in Latino and other communities across the District.”
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