Federal agents swept across Maryland with renewed force in recent months, pushing immigration arrests to their highest level yet under President Donald Trump.

But contrary to the messaging from the president and his team, most of those arrested this year had no criminal history, according to a Banner analysis of newly released federal data.

Some of these trends emerged earlier this year. But the gap between arrests of immigrants with and without criminal records has widened even further. And the total number of violent criminals arrested on immigration charges declined, even as enforcement surged.

According to the most recent available data, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement made over 700 arrests in Maryland between Sept. 1 and Oct. 15. September was the state’s busiest month of enforcement in Trump’s second term, while October was trending close behind.

During that period, 2 out of every 3 people ICE arrested had never before been charged with a crime, the data revealed. About 22% had been convicted of a crime, and 6% had been convicted of a violent crime.

The latest data appears to undercut campaign trail promises made by Trump, who vowed to target enforcement on “violent criminal illegal aliens” that he claimed were terrorizing American communities.

“The administration continues to use this rhetoric in complete disconnection from the reality on the ground,” said Maureen Sweeney, a law professor and director of the University of Maryland’s Immigration Clinic.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for ICE pushed back against the Banner’s findings, saying, “Your data is simply wrong.” Casey Latimer of ICE’s Baltimore field office declined to say what was inaccurate about the analysis, which relied on the agency’s own data.

The numbers were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Deportation Data Project, a group of lawyers and academics working to make information about immigration enforcement public. Released this month, the data includes arrests for civil violations of immigration laws.

“In Baltimore alone, ICE has arrested OVER TWO THOUSAND criminal illegal aliens with prior convictions or pending charges,” Latimer said.

The data analyzed by the Banner does not demonstrate that.

Through the first nine months of Trump’s second term, ICE made over 3,200 arrests in Maryland, nearly three times the total from the same period last year under Biden. Just over half of those arrested had no criminal history. Maryland’s increase slightly outpaced the rest of the country, the analysis found.

“What’s happening is simply unjust,” said one longtime immigrant from Mexico living in Baltimore. The father, whose child is a U.S. citizen, asked not to be named because it could jeopardize his yearslong application for legal status.

Like many others, he said his family feels powerless after self-isolation due to fear that ICE could arrest them.

“Why are they grabbing people that are just going to work?” he asked. “As a community, it hurts us.”

ICE’s operations this year in Maryland have swept up immigrants from 81 countries, from Argentina to Yemen. Around 73% of those arrested immigrated from one of four Latin American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico.

That includes Kilmar Ábrego García, the Beltsville resident whose improper deportation to El Salvador turned into one of this year’s highest-profile, ongoing immigration cases.

“There are thousands of other families like Kilmar’s that do not have the public eye and have been deported … despite court orders," said Ninfa Amador-Hernandez, Maryland policy manager for CASA, the largest immigrant advocacy organization in the state.

Several experts pointed to a substantial impact on people from Spanish-speaking countries after a recent Supreme Court decision that permitted racial profiling as a legitimate reason for immigration stops.

Former officials with the federal Department of Homeland Security, as well as immigration attorneys and advocates also identified what they called an erosion of due-process rights and immigration programs under the current administration that has widened the pool of potential targets for arrest and deportation.

As enforcement efforts have accelerated, advocates who work with Spanish-speaking communities in Maryland say immigrants have curtailed their activities.

That includes children of undocumented parents being held back from school; families grocery shopping at night to avoid detection; patients foregoing health care appointments; and drivers avoiding areas for fear of checkpoints.

“People are comparing it to another pandemic,” said Christina Getrich, a University of Maryland anthropology professor who studies Latino communities.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to be finding work-arounds to logistical barriers that have traditionally restricted the number of arrests by Baltimore’s field office.

Some of those measures include increasing detention space through new partnerships with state governments, expanding the role of local sheriffs and reassigning federal agents from their typical duties to immigration enforcement.

”When your incentives are just to up the numbers, that is exactly what is going to happen," Scott Shuchart, a former high-ranking ICE official under Biden, said of the current administration. “Using the tools they’ve got, they are doing what they wanted to do, to a degree.”

Baltimore’s bottleneck

Throughout the Biden administration, ICE prioritized arresting violent criminals due to space constraints, according to Shuchart.

At that time, many detention facilities across the country used by ICE were full due to record levels of undocumented people trying to cross the nation’s southern border.

Maryland outlawed long-term ICE detention facilities in 2021. So its local field office in Baltimore, with only a few, temporary detention rooms, forced ICE to limit how it arrested and detained undocumented immigrants, Shuchart said.

“Baltimore could not keep people in the holding rooms downtown for days on end,” Shuchart said. “So they could only arrest people everyone agreed was worth keeping.”

Those dynamics shifted under Trump, leading to overcrowding at Baltimore’s temporary cells run by ICE.

Today, as both legal and illegal crossings have fallen at the border, ICE has also hired more agents and increased detention space, thanks to a windfall of congressional funding.

Latimer, the ICE spokesperson, said the agency has “worked diligently to obtain greater necessary detention space while avoiding overcrowding.” She estimated that would translate across the country to “80,000 new ICE beds.”

The Trump administration continues to insist its deportation efforts target violent criminals. But in Maryland, they represent a small fraction — 10% — of immigrants arrested this year, compared with 19% in 2024.

In September, ICE arrested nearly twice as many immigrants as in February, the first full month of Trump’s second term. But the data shows the agency apprehended fewer violent criminals.

A shifting landscape

Other policy changes have also fueled the rise in arrests, according to several experts.

The Trump administration scaled back the ways immigrants can pursue legal immigration status, from pausing review of pending asylum claims to eliminating certain categories of legal status altogether. That “de-legalization” increased the number of immigrants ICE can target for removal, said CASA’s Amador-Hernandez.

As arrests have gone up, immigrant advocates say the Trump administration has also chipped away at the legal avenues by which immigrants can defend themselves and be released from detention.

Immigration judges — who work for the federal Department of Justice — have been increasingly removed by the Trump administration if their past legal work was deemed too friendly to immigrant rights. Appeals on judges’ rulings have also become tougher to win, experts said.

“The system itself … has been so hollowed out and so corrupted that it is no longer functioning in any way that gives due process to the immigrants appearing before it,” Sweeney said.

In September, the appellate board overseeing immigration judges ruled that immigrants who entered the country unlawfully would no longer be eligible for release on bond from ICE custody. Immigration attorney Adam Crandell said he’s seen more people voluntarily sign off on their own deportation rather than sit in detention indefinitely.

Even still, attorney Rachel Girod, Crandell’s law partner, said the firm has worked on a few cases where the government “refuses to take steps to remove people” even months after an individual elected to leave on their own.

“The single most motivating force behind the entire system” Crandell said, “is geared toward keeping as many people locked up for as long as possible.”