As deportations ramp up, immigrants increasingly fear Ice check-ins: 'All bets are off'
Source: The Guardian
Sun 6 Apr 2025 10.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 6 Apr 2025 10.41 EDT
Jorge, a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, reported in February to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland, Oregon, for what he figured would be a routine check-in. Instead, he was arrested and transferred to a detention center in another state.
Alberto, a 42-year-old from Nicaragua who had been granted humanitarian parole, checked in with Ice using an electronic monitoring program that same month. Three days later, he was arrested. Sergei and Marina, a young couple from Russia with a pending asylum case, went into an immigration office in San Francisco in March, thinking they needed to update some paperwork. Agents arrested Sergei and told Marina to come back in a few weeks.
For years, immigrants of all sorts with cases in process, pending appeals or parole, had been required to regularly check in with Ice officers. And so long as they had not violated any regulations or committed any crimes, they were usually sent on their way with little issue. Now, as the Trump administration pushes for the mass arrest and deportation of immigrants, these once routine check-ins have become increasingly fraught.
Ice does not appear to keep count of how many people it has arrested at check-ins. But the Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests in the administration’s first month – may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/06/deportations-immigrants-ice-trump
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