In early March, WMRA submitted a FOIA request to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We received the results at the end of September. The data they released reveals the number of people arrested by ICE in our broadcast region in the first months of President Donald Trump's second presidency, as well as trends within those arrests. WMRA's Bob Leweke sat down with Randi B. Hagi to discuss these records.
BOB LEWEKE: So Randi, you and I talked way back in early July about what the records showed at the time for detentions at the Farmville center. What beyond that were you looking for?
RANDI B. HAGI: The records I asked for on March 4th had to do with immigration detainers: formal requests from ICE to other law enforcement agencies, including local and regional jails, to hold someone in their custody so that the Department of Homeland Security can pick them up. ICE divides the country into "areas of responsibility," or AORs. All of Virginia and D.C., combined, are considered the "Washington AOR." I wanted to know how many detainers had been issued in Virginia and the whole AOR, how many of those people had a criminal conviction on their record, and what crimes they had been convicted of.
On September 27th, ICE emailed me directing me to their online FOIA library, where the agency said records released to other FOIA requesters would satisfy my request. After combing through the more than 60 spreadsheets that yielded, I did find answers to those questions, and more.
LEWEKE: OK, so what did you find?
HAGI: Since detainers are issued to law enforcement agencies, those are generally for people with either a criminal conviction or a pending charge that hasn't been adjudicated yet. And, as multiple local sheriff's departments and jail administrators told WMRA earlier this year, they already had a practice of following these orders from the federal government and would continue to do so.
Looking at detainers from the first two months of the second Trump administration, we can see a wide range in the severity of crimes referenced. They were also executed at different times in the person's interactions with the criminal justice system. Here are a few examples.
One detainer was issued to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail for a woman from Mexico, about 30 years old, who had been charged with a misdemeanor larceny and had no prior convictions. Another was sent to the Rockingham-Harrisonburg Regional Jail for a 20-year-old man with Guatemalan citizenship after he was convicted of an unspecified traffic offense. On the other end of the crime spectrum, an approximately 31-year-old man from Cuba was picked up from the Culpeper County Adult Detention Center after he was convicted of felony drug trafficking and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But the people sought through these detainers are just a fraction of those who are arrested by ICE. In the first two months after Trump’s inauguration, just over 300 people had been booked into detention on an immigration detainer in Virginia and D.C. That's just one-fifth of the total number of people arrested by ICE in this region in that timeframe.
LEWEKE: So what else is new about what you found from these newly released documents?
HAGI: One piece of information within these spreadsheets that we haven't been able to find elsewhere is how many people ICE arrested here in our broadcast region. Listeners should note that includes the Shenandoah Valley from Winchester down to Lexington, the Charlottesville area, and little pockets around Culpeper and Farmville.
We received detailed data on apprehensions through April 28th of this year. So, looking at about the first three months after the presidential inauguration, ICE reports they arrested 139 people in this area. Forty-five of them were deported within that timeframe.
The largest concentration of those arrested in our area were apprehended in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County – 62 people. There were also smaller concentrations in Culpeper, Winchester, and Charlottesville.
It's important to note that these numbers do not reflect the arrest of someone living in our broadcast region who voluntarily checked in at an ICE office elsewhere in the state and was detained there. We previously reported the story of a Staunton woman who says that happened to her husband in June, and the Washington, D.C. field office director acknowledged this practice in an interview with WMRA.
These different locations of arrest show different trends in the persons' criminal records. For instance, the city of Chantilly, near Dulles International Airport, which has an ICE check-in office, is listed as the site of more than 600 arrests in the first three months after the inauguration. Of those arrested in Chantilly, only 11% had been convicted of a crime in the U.S. North Chesterfield, the town where the Richmond office is located, is listed as the site of 300 apprehensions, 8% of which were of someone with a criminal conviction.
That's in contrast to the people who ICE sought out and arrested in our broadcast region, 78% of whom had some kind of criminal conviction on their record.
LEWEKE: Did you find more details about the arrests in the WMRA area?
HAGI: Of those people arrested locally with a criminal conviction, about one quarter had a felony on their record, such as drug trafficking, assault, sexual assault, or a more serious DUI. About three quarters had, at most, a misdemeanor, including lesser assaults and DUIs, as well as licensing violations and traffic offenses. And, just a reminder that these datasets only extend into March and April, before the administration set a quota for federal agents to arrest 3,000 people a day, as The Guardian reported in May. So we don't have the same level of detail about how ICE operations may have changed in Virginia since April. I've filed another FOIA request for more recent, comprehensive data and am waiting on the results.
LEWEKE: Randi, we’ll definitely check back in with you after those newer numbers are released. Thank you for this reporting.
HAGI: Thank you, Bob.
