Are US ICE Roundups an Effective Anti-Crime Strategy?

Deborah Bonello: Hi there, welcome back, everyone. My name is Deborah Bonello. I’m the managing editor of insightcrime.org, and I’m joined by one of our chief investigators, James Bargent. Now, you have to have been living under a rock to have missed the immigration roundups that we’ve been seeing in Minneapolis since December. Federal officials are now calling it the largest immigration enforcement operation ever, involving more than 3,000 federal agents from both ICE and CBP. Two American citizens were shot and killed by federal agents this month, and the third person, Victor Manuel Diaz, died in ICE custody in late January.

The driving purpose of the raids? According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE is targeting dangerous criminal illegal aliens, specifically citing individuals with prior convictions for homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and gang involvement.

So, James, we saw similar raids take place in Nashville last year under the guise of rounding up members of the Tren de Aragua and Mara Salvatrucha gangs. Can you tell us a little bit about the investigation that you did into that for InSight, what you found, and what parallels you can draw between what happened in Nashville and what we’re seeing now in Minneapolis?

James Bargent: Morning, Deb. So we started this investigation last year after the Trump administration came into office, and we saw these really dramatic changes in immigration enforcement operations and strategies where the government was really using the threat posed by organized crime — and specifically Latin American-origin organized crime — as a kind of explanation and justification for these new tactics. 

So we did a kind of deep dive, like took the state of Tennessee as a case study. As you mentioned, there was a weeklong ICE special enforcement operation here that we delved into and broke down the results and the tactics used in that operation. And then we also did a threat assessment to look at what groups are actually present and what kind of threat they represent to communities in the state.

And I think from the conclusions from that investigation, we can see real parallels, real similarities with what we’re seeing now in Minneapolis, but also some key differences. There’s really been an evolution in how they’re implementing these immigration enforcement operations.

I’d say the major difference we’ve seen is just in scale. So when they started these operations, we would see them last for a few days, a week here in Tennessee, sometimes longer. But the one in Minneapolis has now been going on for over two months, and it’s involved around 3,000 federal agents deployed. So as you say, this is the biggest immigration enforcement operation we’ve seen so far. And this is reflected also in the detentions they’ve made. So, here in Nashville, there were just under 200 arrests made in that week between the Tennessee Highway Patrol and ICE officials. Whereas in Minneapolis, we’ve seen they’re reporting over 4,000 arrests have been made.

I think another key difference we’re seeing is in the aggressiveness of the tactics. So, they’ve used various different methods during these special enforcement operations. But here in Nashville, again, the main one was traffic stops. So, ICE partnered with the Tennessee Highway Patrol. They basically deployed to parts of the city with high concentrations of migrant populations and just made a lot of traffic stops and inspected people’s immigration status during those stops and arrested those that couldn’t prove that they had the status to be here. 

Whereas what we’re seeing now is a much more aggressive street presence, not only in these violent confrontations we’re seeing with protesters, as you mentioned, that have turned deadly, but also in their pursuit of targets.

Where we’re seeing similarities, though, is in the results. So it’s important to note there’s been a real lack of transparency and reliable data that’s really limited our ability to fully delve into the data behind these operations. The approach we’ve taken is to really focus on the operational reports that DHS and ICE have been publishing. 

So these are limited. They’re essentially highlights packages rather than complete data sets. But, as they’re highlights packages, we can at least assume that they are including all their main arrests and the most dangerous criminals and all the rest of it. So, it may not be a complete picture, but it’s enough to give us a sense of just how effective these operations are being in targeting gangs and organized crime.

What we found, we analyzed as part of our investigation, 26 special enforcement operations between March and September. There was supposedly targeting the worst of the worst or the worst first. Top of that worst list is always organized crime. So gangs and transnational criminal networks. In these operations, they made over 7,000 arrests. But only 41 of them were alleged to have gang ties or links to organized crime. And of those 41, only 11 of those were actually named, allowing us to do any sort of process of verification. So we’re talking about less than half a percent of the reported detentions being linked to gangs and criminal organizations.

If we compare that to what we’re seeing now in Minneapolis, I’ve been through 22 DHS reports detailing the results of these operations where they’re claiming to have made over 4,000 arrests, as I mentioned before. In these reports, they highlighted 187 people they are calling “the worst of the worst, the most hardened criminals, the organized crime, the violent offenders.” Of those, only five were listed as having any type of alleged gang ties. And another six had criminal convictions that are related to organized crime: so drug trafficking, money laundering. So we’re talking about less than half of a percent.

And of the rest of the people that they’re naming and shaming in these reports, these results reports, there is a fair number of people convicted of very serious crimes. Murder, sexual offenses, this sort of thing.

But there’s also a large number of people whose criminal records are for pretty petty offenses and public order offenses — people with DUIs and assault charges, even shoplifting, things like that. So it’s kind of hard to justify these claims that all of these people are grave threats to society.

And then the ICE reports themselves — they only put out two reports, and they listed 13 gang members in total. I’m sure there’s probably some overlap between these. I didn’t have time to cross-reference each name that DHS and ICE put out. But even if we’re combining these two figures together, we’re looking at 24 people. That’s from a two-month deployment of thousands of federal agents that’s detained over 4,000 people.

Deborah Bonello: Right, so 20 people roughly out of the 4,000 arrests they’ve made since December have any kind of concrete link to organized crime or gang activity? Is that what you’re saying?

James Bargent: That have any alleged links to gang activity or organized crime based on these reports. Now, there have been cases that other journalists and we’ve kind of looked into, where sometimes those allegations don’t stand up. So, yeah, 24 is what they are claiming. So that is the highest possible number we’re looking at, essentially.

Deborah Bonello: Right. So, it’s a pretty low percentage of the people who are being dragged in by these raids. 

James Bargent: Which leads us to the next question we were looking to answer, which is, is this effective? Leaving aside all the politics and the values of the issue, is this an effective crime-fighting strategy?

And here what we’re looking at is that you may be removing some dangerous individuals. Some of these people who have been caught up in these immigration sweeps are no doubt serious criminals or people with violent histories, and removing them is going to have some kind of positive impact on your community.

But if your aim and your objective is to dismantle criminal organizations and have a long term impact on citizen security and the impact they have on communities in this country, then it’s kind of hard to make an argument that that’s an effective way of doing it.

As you know, Deb, to dismantle a criminal organization, it requires long, slow investigations into its structure, its operations, the networks that sustain it. That’s what’s needed to really dismantle and disarticulate these criminal networks. And to go back to Nashville, you know, in the ICE sweep, there was one guy who was detained, who was an alleged MS-13 member who had an Interpol red notice out for him — a quite serious criminal history.

But to compare that to what we saw in September here, that was a major operation with 17 arrests, seizures of drugs and guns based on a nine-month multi-agency operation. Now, even that is unlikely to have finished off MS-13 in Nashville.

It’s resilient, it recycles, it regrows. But that’s the sort of thing that generally is more effective at taking down organized crime and having a sustainable long-term impact on citizen security.

Now, the argument I heard from people working in this immigration area is, this is not one or the other. These things can be complementary, right? So their argument is, you know, you can still do these long, slow investigations. And then immigration enforcement is just kind of working up at the edges, picking up what these investigations leave behind. Maybe they didn’t have enough evidence on certain people, but they can just remove them from the country.

There’s a certain validity to that argument. But I think if you look at the resources being poured into this and the results, and your aim really is to target organized crime, then it’s really hard to argue that that is an efficient and effective way to do it, especially when you see what we see at the moment, which is huge, unprecedented amounts of resources pouring into immigration enforcement at the same time as the federal agencies traditionally tasked with investigative work, so DEA, FBI, this sort of thing, are facing budget cuts.

And then there’s another angle to this that some law enforcement sources expressed concerns to me about. And that is that these operations can actually negatively impact the capacity to build these investigations. Because one of the key components of it is community relations. If you want intelligence on how these groups operate, if you want people to testify against them, you need witnesses. You need people from the communities who are willing to come and talk to you.

And if those people are scared to engage with federal agents in any way because of their immigration status or because, you know, they know people with immigration status issues or any of these reasons at all, then that could actually hamper your capacity to carry out these investigations.

Deborah Bonello: Yeah, I mean, listening to what you were saying, your previous point to do with the effectiveness, I think there’s this duality of visibility, right? Because I think these deep investigations that dismantle criminal organizations, a lot of that is very invisible work where agents are working behind the scenes, sometimes undercover, doing deep dives. And it lacks the visibility of these raids, which send a very strong message, for better or worse, to voters, to the community, and to the world, in terms of what will be tolerated and what won’t be tolerated in the US, and what the kind of language used around those kinds of detentions, which looking at the figures, you know, again, 20 people connected to gang activity and organized crime in 4,000 arrests is rather like trying to perform heart surgery with a blunt spoon. 

I mean, I wonder whether — I’m sure we’re not the only organization to point out the things that we’re talking about today, James. I wonder whether that will have any kind of discouraging effect on the federal government to change tack. What do you think?

James Bargent: I mean, I think you make a very important point, which is also something that some law enforcement sources raise with me here, that there is very much a message component of what they’re doing. Like the spectacle of what they’re doing has its own impact beyond the kind of security impact. So, one ex-prosecutor I talked to here said to me after the Nashville operations, look, okay, you might not be dismantling a criminal organization here, but it’s going to have a chilling effect on organized crime in the sense that these gang members, they’re not going to be out and about doing what they would usually be doing if they’re looking over their shoulder worrying that ICE is on every corner.

And of course, that’s true. Well, there’s certainly some truth to that. But I think it has to be said that that also essentially puts the gang members in the same position as pretty much anyone living in a migrant community right now. So it has this chilling effect on them in the same way that we’re seeing people kind of reluctant to go to work or to go to school or to move about freely. That applies to gang members as well. If they are worried about being picked up over immigration, then they are less likely to be going about their daily activities, whether your daily activity is going to work or whether it’s organized crime.

I think you can make an argument that that kind of visual message will have a kind of chilling impact. I think it’s harder to make the argument that that will have a sustainable long-term impact on organized crime’s capacity to operate in the US or its impact on citizen security and community service.

Deborah: Yeah. Well, we’ll be watching. I’m sure you will be too, James. And thanks very much for joining us and sharing your thoughts and your experience on that investigation.

James Bargent: Good to be here. Thanks, Deb.