ICE says it has arrested 10,000 ‘criminal illegal aliens’ in Minnesota, but offers little proof

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis,” since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, including 3,000 in the past six weeks.

The numbers have been repeated. Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino repeated the numbers in a news conference Jan. 20, and Marcos Charles, executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE, repeated them Jan. 22.

As Operation Metro Surge continues, flooding the state with what DHS officials say are thousands of officers or agents, here’s what we know about the eye-catching figure of 10,000 arrests:

It’s nearly impossible to independently verify any of ICE’s numbers. The agency has refused to release information or provide names of all those detained, and immigration court has become increasingly opaque, with hearings held in secret.

But if ICE has arrested 10,000 people in the past year, a majority of the arrests would have had to occur before Dec. 1, when it began sending officers into the state.

The 10,000 figure is a substantial increase from what officials have said previously.

On Jan. 6, Noem said over 1,500 people had been arrested in Minneapolis for immigration violations during the surge. Late last week, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said 2,500 people had been arrested during the surge. Then Monday, the DHS said the total was 3,000.

Their latest report found 1,677 arrests in Minnesota from when Trump took office through Oct. 15.

If their numbers are accurate, the only way ICE could have arrested 10,000 people since Trump took office is if they arrested over 5,300 people in the six-week period before Operation Metro Surge began. That’s 2,000 more than they say they arrested during the surge over the past six weeks.

The Pew Research Center estimated in 2023 that Minnesota is home to 130,000 immigrants without legal status. The state has nearly 6 million people.

If 10,000 undocumented people have been arrested in Minnesota, that would represent nearly 8% of the state’s total undocumented population.

The DHS also claimed to have arrested the same number of “illegal aliens” — more than 10,000 — in Los Angeles from June to mid-December. Los Angeles has a population of nearly 4 million.

The DHS has not responded to a request for comment about the 10,000 figure.

Minnesota has relatively few undocumented immigrants compared to the rest of the nation and other larger states — less than 1% of the U.S. total.

Minnesota’s 130,000 undocumented people are a fraction of the total in California and Texas, which each have more than 2 million, according to estimates from Pew.

Unauthorized immigrants in Minnesota also make up a relatively small percentage of the state’s total population, at 2.2%, compared to a national average of about 4%.

So far, the Trump administration has selected blue-state cities of Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and Minneapolis for high-profile immigration crackdowns. This week, federal officials announced an operation in Maine, home to a mere 1.4 million people, including African refugees in several cities.

Federal officials frequently describe the people they’ve arrested in Minnesota as the “worst of the worst.”

But it’s difficult to verify those claims, since the DHS has only released the names of about 240 immigrants arrested as of Jan. 19. About 80% of them have felony convictions for crimes like murder, rape, theft, drugs or fraud. But nearly all of those have gone through the court system, served their time and were not actively wanted by police when they were detained by ICE, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune analysis.

Public records indicate that in many cases, they were picked up after being released from jail or prison and paroled.

More than a quarter also have no criminal connection to Minnesota except for being held in one of the state’s four federal prisons.