ICE Launches Raids Targeting Migrant Families

A small number of coordinated federal raids targeting undocumented migrant parents and their children took place over the weekend, the beginning of the Trump administration’s plan to swiftly enforce deportation orders against some 2,000 recently arrived migrants who are not eligible to remain in the country.

Only a handful of arrests appeared to take place, and they were reported in just a few cities. That was much different than the nationwide show of force that had originally been planned, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were expected to fan out in unison on Sunday morning across immigrant communities in major cities. But the authorities said that more arrests would follow through the week.

The plans for the operation were changed at the last minute because of news reports that had tipped off immigrant communities about what to expect, according to several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. Instead of a large simultaneous sweep, the authorities created a secondary plan for a smaller and more diffuse scale of apprehensions to roll out over roughly a week. Individual ICE field offices were given the discretion to decide when to begin, one official said.

The first reports of ICE activity came in on Friday and Saturday. In Chicago, a mother was apprehended with her daughters, but the family was immediately released under supervision according to a person familiar with the operation. ICE agents approached at least one other home in the area, but the woman inside refused to answer the door, according to local news reports.

In New York, agents attempted two arrests on Saturday in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, and a third in East Harlem, according to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.

A teenager who lives with her parents in Passaic, N.J., said she was awakened at about 1 a.m. Sunday by a knock on the door from people she believed to be ICE agents. Having seen numerous “know your rights” posts on Instagram, she knew not to open it.

“They said, ‘We need to talk to you, can you come outside, can you open the door?’ I said, ‘Do you have permission to come inside my house, do you have a paper?’” she recounted. “They said, ‘We’re not trying to come inside your house, we just want to speak with you.’ And I said, ‘No I’m not coming outside.”

After some persistence, she said, the door-knockers left. But at 5 a.m., more arrived, now surrounding the house with flashlights and banging on the door and window. Liza ran upstairs to be with her parents, and they hid with the lights off. She said she was “too scared to look outside,” and was unable to see any uniforms the people may have been wearing. Eventually they left again.

Though millions of people live in the United States without documentation and are periodically targeted for deportation, the latest raids are aimed primarily at families from Central America who have been arriving in large numbers since fall. With President Trump repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to slow the ongoing surge, the raids aim to deport parents and children who are not eligible to stay in the country — some within months after their arrival — as a way to deter others from coming.

A number of undocumented immigrants took measures over the weekend to avoid interacting with the authorities — staying home and not answering the door — but some will not have that option when the workweek begins on Monday, suggesting that agents may be more successful at making arrests.

“My boss said we should be on alert because ICE may show up, but I also have to go to work,” said Arcenio, an undocumented immigrant in the New York borough of Queens. He was standing on Roosevelt Avenue with his wife, Elizabeth, as a group of about 200 immigrant activists and politicians marched by, protesting the raids and chanting “Stand Up! Fight Back!”

“I can’t stay home all day,” Arcenio said. “My children need food. I need to pay rent. We have to keep living our lives. We know that there is a risk we won’t see our children when we close our apartment door. I really don’t want to think about it.”

Three of his American-born children — two boys, 12 and 8, and a 4-year-old girl — fidgeted next to the couple. Their youngest, a 2-month-old girl, rested in her baby carrier.

“The little ones don’t understand what’s happening, they are too young,” he said. “My oldest does. He watches the news and comes and asks me, ‘Dad, why do they want to separate us? Why do they want to deport you?’” Arcenio said with a sad smile. “He knows we don’t have papers. He’s afraid I may not come back every time I leave the house.”

Immigrant advocates in targeted regions of the country who were standing by to support anyone who was arrested were surprised to have a relatively uneventful day.

Early Sunday morning, about 30 volunteer “ICE chasers” had fanned out across the Atlanta suburbs, where many Latino immigrants live. But after nearly three hours without any reports of arrests, they returned to the offices of a local advocacy organization for coffee and doughnuts, saying they would start again on Monday morning.

In Los Angeles, Shannon Camacho, a coordinator for the city’s rapid response network for immigrants, said the group’s work over the weekend, helping undocumented families prepare for possible detentions, was not wasted. While there have been no mass arrests so far, she said, families are now better prepared for whatever happens in the future.

Ms. Camacho also warned against paying heed to speculation on the internet. “We do get a lot of false alarms on social media, and that causes a lot of panic in the community,” she said. “People are afraid to go outside, to go to church, to go to the grocery store, and that’s harmful.”

The immigration authorities planned to continue making arrests throughout the week in at least 10 cities. They had identified at least 2,000 targets for the raids but may ultimately arrest fewer. Typically, only 20 to 30 percent of the targets of ICE enforcement are apprehended. And because agents cannot legally force their way in to the homes of their targets, they rely on the element of surprise to be successful — suggesting that the current, highly publicized raids could result in even fewer arrests than usual.

The operation was originally scheduled for late June, but it was postponed after harsh opposition from Democratic lawmakers and immigrant advocates. Mr. Trump confirmed on Friday that it would go ahead over the weekend.

“They’re going to take people out and they’re going to bring them back to their countries,” the president said. “Or they’re going to take criminals out, put them in prison, or put them in prison in the countries they came from.”

Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told “Fox & Friends” on Sunday that the operation was intended to enforce the rule of law.

“Those individuals who remain here illegally, especially those who’ve received due process more than any other nation in the world would provide someone that came here illegally, to include those with final orders, that there are consequences to those that remain here illegally,” he said.

Despite the operation’s sluggish rollout, the threat alone was enough to spark concern and upend weekend plans for many undocumented immigrants, including those who feared that the raids could sweep up far more people than just those who were targeted.

Norelia Sanchez, an immigrant family support worker with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association in Immokalee, Fla., said local residents started calling her at 6 a.m. on Friday, saying that ICE agents were “knocking door by door” in the town, a modest agricultural community of about 25,000 people about 40 miles east of Naples.

Some parents called the center’s offices that day to say they were too scared to send their children to summer day care and education programs. “The ones who did, you could actually see mothers with children, holding their hands, holding their cellphones, and they were literally running to the school,” Ms. Sanchez said.

During large-scale immigration raids, many people turn to social media to monitor the location of agents, trying to keep themselves safe.

Ahead of the latest raids, immigrant advocates had attempted their own detective work, trying to ferret out where and how the arrests would be conducted. In Atlanta, lawyers began posting on social media based on a report that ICE agents had rented 40 minivans for the week, a rumor that quickly spread but remained unconfirmed.

Those arrested were expected to be held in detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania that are specially equipped to hold families. But because of space limitations, some would probably be booked into hotel rooms until their travel documents could be prepared, ICE officials said. The agency’s goal is to deport the families as quickly as possible.

There were a large number of deportations during the Obama administration, but they mainly involved single adults who had been convicted of crimes.

“During Obama, the overwhelming majority of enforcement actions targeted criminal aliens,” said John Cohen, former acting under secretary at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. “This operation apparently specifically targets families who for the most part present no risk.”

While ICE agents must wait for their targets to come outside of their homes voluntarily in order to arrest them, they are expected to come prepared with common tactics they have used in the past to coax their targets into cooperating. For example, agents often carry decoy photos, holding them up to the windows of migrants who are being targeted and pretending to be looking for someone else, to persuade them to open the door.

Agents also sometimes claim to be police officers responding to calls about domestic disturbances or gas leaks. They also have used social media to capture targets by making fake accounts on online dating websites and arranging rendezvous.

Mr. Cohen said the raids were impractical and not likely to improve the situation at the border — where holding facilities have been overrun recently, and as a result, migrants have been living in substandard conditions.