ICE's Enforcement Blitz in Chicago Shows Familiar Pattern: 78% of Arrests are "Low Risk" According to Government's Own Data

New federal disclosures through ongoing Castañon Nava Settlement reveal that Chicago’s immigration crackdown overwhelmingly targeted people who pose little to no public safety risk.

Donald Trump used false claims that about murder rates and immigrant criminality in Chicago to justify sending a deluge of ICE officers into the city to allegedly crack down on crime. But new data released under the Castañon Nava consent degree call these absurd claims into question and reinforce other research that shows that ICE is overwhelmingly targeting non-criminals rather than dangerous high-priority criminals and national security threats.

The latest data represents a subset of data on ICE arrests ordered by a federal judge to produced for the court. According to this data, out of 607 arrests, only sixteen people were categorized as “high public safety risks,” just one person was labeled a national security risk, and another one person was classified as a “foreign criminal.” By contrast, nearly 8 out of 10 people, 78% overall, were assessed by the government itself as low risk.

The larger picture is even more revealing and consistent with data that I and other have published over the past year. Just 2.6% of those arrested had any prior offense serious enough for ICE to place them in the high-risk category. That means more than 97% of the people swept up in this high-profile, taxpayer-funded enforcement operation were not the “worst of the worst,” despite repeated claims to the contrary.

None of ICE’s misdirection is new. Consider revisiting my previous post on “Data Immigration Data Literacy Skills to Help You Survive a New Wave of ICE Confusion” to beef up your intellectual defenses against mis- and disinformation.

This crucial data didn’t emerge from goodwill or transparency. It came from court-ordered disclosures under the Castañon Nava Consent Decree, a 2022 settlement agreement that itself was born from ICE’s pattern of constitutional violations during a 2018 enforcement operation in Chicago.

That earlier operation, called “Operation Keep Safe,” saw ICE arrest over 100 people using many of the same problematic tactics we’re seeing today: officers wearing vests marked “Police” instead of identifying themselves as immigration agents, pretextual traffic stops, and warrantless arrests of people going about their daily lives. The consent decree was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of enforcement, but here we are again, with a federal judge concluding that hundreds of recent arrests violated the very protections that settlement established.

In other words, ICE’s current behavior isn’t an aberration: it’s a pattern that requires constant legal vigilance to constrain. The consent decree itself proved necessary because ICE had already demonstrated it would conduct mass arrest operations without following constitutional requirements. Now, seven years later, the same dynamics are playing out: aggressive rhetoric about targeting dangerous criminals, enforcement operations that overwhelmingly sweep up low-risk individuals, and tactics that violate legal constraints designed to protect Fourth Amendment rights.

And according to long-time Homeland Security Investigations personnel quoted in the reporting, this gap between rhetoric and reality is not an accident. As I’ve explained to reporters on many occasions, it is structurally easier, faster, and operationally cheaper to arrest large numbers of low-priority individuals than to build cases against genuinely dangerous actors. In other words, the politics of appearing tough outweigh the actual work of targeting real public safety threats.

See full article here.

A federal judge has now concluded that hundreds of these recent Chicago arrests may have violated the consent decree, which bars warrantless detentions without probable cause and evidence of flight risk. Because DHS agents were incorrectly told that the decree had been canceled—or perhaps more accurately, because the administration wanted to operate as if it had been—the court ordered that 615 people be released into Alternatives to Detention programs on bond by November 21. The judge also directed the government to produce a complete list of those detained during Operation Midway Blitz—more than 3,000 people—with their risk assessments and country-of-origin information.

For those of us who follow detention data closely, none of this is surprising. I have written repeatedly that the administration’s stated focus on “dangerous criminals” simply does not compute when compared to the government’s internal datasets. The Chicago numbers only reinforce what my research has shown for years: most people in ICE custody do not have criminal convictions, and large enforcement surges overwhelmingly target low-priority individuals who do not pose a threat to the public. The fact that we need a consent decree—and that we needed one in 2022 for violations that occurred in 2018—tells us everything about whether claims of targeting “the worst of the worst” match operational reality.

Number of Detained Immigrants with No Criminal History Continues to Grow

This is also not a marginal discrepancy. It is a structural reality in immigration enforcement, one that shapes public fear, distorts policymaking, and misuses extraordinary resources while doing little to improve public safety. Chicago is simply the latest example in a pattern that stretches across field offices, operations, and administrations.

What’s particularly revealing is that even when legal settlements explicitly constrain these practices, ICE reverts to the same playbook the moment it thinks it can get away with it. The administration may claim it’s pursuing a new approach focused on public safety, but the data obtained through court order reveals what actually happens when the cameras are off and the legal guardrails are ignored.