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The Trump administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have claimed that federal immigration agents are targeting dangerous criminals in recent enforcement operations. However, ICE arrest data from this year, recently obtained through a lawsuit by The Deportation Data Center at the University of California, Berkeley, indicates otherwise for the Rocky Mountain region.
Several reporters with The Colorado Sun and Wyoming’s WyoFile sifted through regional data and found that most people arrested by ICE this year in Colorado and Wyoming did not have a criminal history.
Aspen Public Radio and Aspen Journalism’s Eleanor Bennett spoke with The Colorado Sun’s Sandra Fish and Taylor Dolven this week to learn more about their findings.
The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
Eleanor Bennett: Taylor, can you start by telling us what you learned about arrest numbers in our Rocky Mountain region?
Taylor Dolven: Yeah. So for this story, we looked at all of the arrests made by the Denver Field Office, which includes both Colorado and Wyoming, and we saw that immigration arrests between Jan. 20 and June 26 of this year in Colorado quadrupled compared to the same time period last year, and they nearly tripled in Wyoming — so, really, a surge in ICE arrests, a skyrocketing in the numbers.
Bennett: And the Trump administration says that it's prioritizing immigrants who have criminal histories, but that's not what you found in Colorado and Wyoming.
Can you talk about what you learned, like, who has been arrested in our region since Trump took office?
Dolven: This year, the percentage of people who were arrested who had criminal convictions at the time of their arrest was 39%, and that's way down from under the Biden administration when the percentage of people arrested by ICE with criminal convictions was 61%. So we're seeing a real shift and a deprioritization of people with criminal convictions under The Trump administration, at least, that's what the data shows.
Bennett: It sounds like you were able to get some of this data broken down by county.
Sandra, what can you tell us about ICE arrests in our Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valley area?
Sandra Fish: So Eleanor, Pitkin and Garfield counties during the Trump era had fewer than 50 arrests. It's less than 2% of the nearly 3,200 arrests we examined. And there's a 75% increase in the two counties under Trump compared to Biden, but that's far less of an increase than what the state as a whole experienced. Really, most of these arrests are centered in urban areas: Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs.
Bennett: I know there have been some raids and mass arrests in Colorado, but those have been rare in Wyoming.
Taylor, can you talk about what kinds of tactics we know that ICE is using?
Dolven: So the data that we analyzed, which comes from ICE, doesn't include much about the nature of the arrests, but we know from interviews with immigrant advocates that there seems to be a lot of arrests happening at workplaces, at homes and at immigration court.
I interviewed a lawyer who's worked representing immigrants in Colorado for the last 15 years, and she said she had never before seen someone with a pending asylum claim who had no criminal convictions be arrested, and now she's seeing that pretty often, she said.
And so another trend that we heard from advocates we spoke to was that often it seems like ICE is pursuing someone that they have the name of, but when they get to that person's workplace or house, they end up arresting many more people than the person they intended to. So there are a lot more people being swept up in this sort of mass deportation immigration enforcement policy than under previous administrations.
Bennett: Regional data on ICE arrests only recently became available.
Sandra, why has it been so hard to get this information, and what are some of the limitations you ran into even with this most recent dataset?
Fish: You know, The Deportation Data Center at the University of California, Berkeley, they sued the federal government to get this data from ICE, but ICE will not even confirm that it's accurate.
And I have to say, one of my big caveats with any government data is that it's entered by humans, and humans sometimes make errors. And also my sense is that a lot of agencies gather data, but they never look at it to analyze it and talk about it.
So the arrest data that we worked with here is considered the most reliable of the five data sets they received, and that's what The Sun and other major news organizations analyzed.
Bennett: And Sandra, I want to end by asking you why you guys felt it was important to look into who ICE has been targeting under the Trump administration?
Fish: We've had a lot of anecdotal information that's been reported since Jan. 20, that many of the people who are being rounded up by ICE are people with jobs. They're people who have children who were born here, and thus are citizens. And I just think it's important to look at this data and see that the data actually bears that out.
And I think that people should be a little concerned, perhaps, about why, even the people with convictions, many of them are drunk driving or traffic offenses. So the data bears out anecdotal evidence. And I think it's always important to try to get that data so we can confirm, or not confirm, what people are saying.
