ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations is one of the biggest investigative agency that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has. The group works in a variety of ways to remove illegal immigrants from Arizona and other parts of the country.
What does ICE do?
ICE ERO performs criminal arrests in addition to arresting noncitizens for an administrative violation of immigration law. An administrative violation occurs when an administrative agency has taken final action and come to the conclusion that a person or entity violated its regulations. The agency also helps with the prosecutions resulting from these arrests and related criminal acts.
For the fiscal year 2020, 103,603 administrative arrests were conducted by this agency. This was a decrease from the previous fiscal year.
An administrative arrest is when someone is arrested and detained without being given a trial. The main justification for this measure in some jurisdictions is the safety and security of the public.
2020 also saw a total of 4,360 criminal arrests, 5,397 convictions, and 4,479 criminal charges that came as a direct result of ICE’s immigration enforcement activities. Of the individuals who were arrested, 92 percent either had criminal charges that were still pending or had already been convicted of a crime by the time the arrest took place.
In 2020, 184,884 removals were administered by ICE ERO. This was a decline of 30 percent from the previous fiscal year, partly due to fewer interior arrests made by the agency.
A significant drop in CBP apprehensions
At the Southwest U.S. border, in particular, Customs and Border Protection apprehensions went down dramatically because 42 U.S.C. §§ 265 and 268 had been employed. This action authorized the expulsion of noncitizens from the U.S. which was an alternative to these types of arrests.
ICE ERO focuses its efforts on the individuals who are the most significant danger to the general public or even national security. 92 percent of the people who this agency apprehended and removed from the interior of the United States had been convicted of a crime or had criminal charges that were pending.