ICE Launches Low-Key Raids Targeting Migrant Families - The New York Times

Coordinated federal raids targeting undocumented migrant parents and their children began over the weekend, part of President Trump’s pledge to swiftly enforce deportation orders against thousands of recently arrived migrants who are not eligible to remain in the country.

Only a handful of arrests appeared to take place, and they were reported in only a few cities. That was much different than the nationwide show of force that had originally been planned, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were expected to fan out in unison on Sunday morning across immigrant communities in major cities. But the authorities said that more arrests would follow through the week.

The plans were changed at the last minute because of news reports that had tipped off immigrant communities about what to expect, according to several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials familiar with the operation. Instead of a larger simultaneous sweep, the authorities made a secondary plan for a smaller and more diffuse scale of arrests rolling out over roughly a week, giving individual ICE field offices discretion to decide when to begin.

The first reports came in on Friday and Saturday. In Chicago, a mother was a arrested with her daughters, but that family was immediately released under an agreement to be closely supervised, according to a person familiar with the operation.

In New York, two “ICE enforcement attempts” were reported on Saturday in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, with a third incident in Harlem, according to the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs. “No arrests were made to our knowledge,” the office said in a statement.

An additional operation was reported in Florida.

The immigration authorities planned to continue making arrests throughout the week. They identified at least 2,000 targets of the operation, but may ultimately arrest far fewer. In most such operations in the past, only 20 to 30 percent of the targets have been apprehended.

Because agents cannot legally use force to enter the homes of their targets, they rely on the element of surprise to be successful, suggesting that the current, highly publicized operation could yield an even smaller proportion of arrests.

The operation is one of the first to target not just undocumented adults, but parents and children who are part of the recent wave of migrant families that have arrived from Central America and elsewhere on the southern border, many of them seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.

All of those targeted have been issued orders of deportation. Many were ordered deported because they failed to appear in immigration court as directed, though migrant lawyers say that a large number of recent arrivals were not informed of their court dates and did not know where or when to appear.

Arrests were planned in nearly a dozen cities.

The operation was originally scheduled for late June, but it was postponed after harsh opposition from Democratic lawmakers and immigrant advocates. Mr. Trump confirmed on Friday that it would go ahead over the weekend.

“They’re going to take people out and they’re going to bring them back to their countries,” the president said. “Or they’re going to take criminals out, put them in prison, or put them in prison in the countries they came from.”

Millions of people live in the United States without documentation, but the plan for the raids was formulated out of Mr. Trump’s frustration over the record numbers of migrant families who have been arriving from Central America, beginning in the fall and increasing since then. June was the first month this year in which arrivals decreased. The 28 percent drop that month was probably caused by the rising summer heat and the Trump administration’s pressure on Mexico to hold back migrants seeking to travel through that country.

“This is about the rule of law,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told Fox & Friends on Sunday. “Those individuals who remain here illegally, especially those who’ve received due process more than any other nation in the world would provide someone that came here illegally, to include those with final orders, that there are consequences to those that remain here illegally. That’s what today is about.”

Despite the operation’s low-key rollout, the threat of arrests was enough to spark fear and upend weekend plans for many undocumented immigrations, with fears spreading that the raids could sweep in far more people than just the targeted recent arrivals.

Many were hunkering down indoors, or went into hiding to stay as far as possible from the addresses that the federal authorities had on file for them.

One family canceled a vacation to Florida on the advice of their lawyer, who had said that traveling could put the father, who is living in the country illegally, at risk.

Norelia Sanchez, an immigrant family support worker with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association in Immokalee, Fla., said local residents called her at 6 a.m. on Friday when ICE agents were spotted “knocking door by door” in the town, a modest agricultural community of about 25,000 people about 40 miles east of Naples.

Some parents called the center’s offices and said they were too scared to send their children to summer day care and education programs. “The ones who did, you could actually see mothers with children, holding their hands, holding their cellphones, and they were literally running to the school,” Ms. Sanchez said.

During immigration enforcement operations, many immigrants turn to their cellphones and computers to monitor the location of agents based on social media reports, trying to keep themselves safe.

Ahead of the raids, immigrant advocates tried to do their own detective work, attempting to ferret out where and how the arrests would be conducted. In Atlanta, lawyers began posting on social media based on a report that ICE agents had rented 40 minivans for the week, a rumor that quickly spread but remained unconfirmed.

Immigration authorities, when possible, were planning to house any migrant families detained at detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania specially equipped to deal with families. But because of space limitations, some were expected to be booked into hotel rooms until their travel documents could be prepared, ICE officials said. The agency’s goal is to deport the families as quickly as possible.

There were a large number of deportations during the Obama administration, but they mainly involved single adults who had been convicted of crimes.

“During Obama, the overwhelming majority of enforcement actions targeted criminal aliens,” said John Cohen, former acting under secretary at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. “This operation apparently specifically targets families who for the most part present no risk.”

Four nonprofit groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in New York seeking a court order blocking the operation. In the lawsuit, the lawyers claim that many of the migrants failed to appear for their scheduled appearances in immigration court because border agency officials had failed to inform them of their court dates.

Other advocacy groups have been mobilizing for weeks, disseminating information to anyone who may be targeted about how to avoid being arrested and what to do if it happens anyway.

While ICE agents must wait for their targets to come outside of their homes voluntarily in order to arrest them, they are expected to come prepared with common tactics they have used in the past to coax their targets into cooperating. For example, agents often carry decoy photos, holding them up to the windows of migrants who are being targeted and pretending to be looking for someone else, to persuade them to open the door.

Agents also sometimes claim to be police officers responding to calls about domestic disturbances or gas leaks. They also have used social media to capture targets by making fake accounts on online dating websites and arranging rendezvous.

Mr. Cohen, the former acting under secretary of Homeland Security, said the raids were impractical and not likely to improve the situation at the border — where holding facilities have been overrun recently, and as a result, migrants have been living in substandard and sometimes unhealthy conditions.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version gave an out-of-date title for Mark Morgan. He is the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, not the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Contributing reporting were Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Chris Cameron in Washington, Max Blau in Atlanta and Andrea Salcedo in New York.