U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has cut its deployment in Minnesota down to 47 deportation officers, and they’re focused on picking up deportation targets from prisons and jails, the agency told a federal judge Friday.
That marks a major downshift from the heady days of Operation Metro Surge, the enforcement push that saw ICE focus on at-large arrests — those made out in the community — in the Minneapolis area.
David Easterwood, ICE’s acting field office director in St. Paul, said another batch of deportation officers will arrive over the next couple of weeks. The new agents are rotating in for officers who are heading out, with the manpower remaining at 47 people concentrating on the Criminal Alien Program.
“The mission of CAP is the identification, arrest and removal of priority aliens who are incarcerated within federal, state and local prisons and jails,” Mr. Easterwood said.
ICE has an additional 435 Homeland Security Investigations agents focused not on civil deportation cases, but on criminal cases of fraud and money laundering, Mr. Easterwood said in court papers filed with U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, who has been overseeing a case challenging Homeland Security’s interactions with demonstrators in Minnesota.
Customs and Border Protection, the other major immigration enforcement agency, has already pulled all of its extra people out of Minnesota. The last 67 of them were “demobilized” on Feb. 23, Marty Raybon Sr., CBP’s lead coordinator for the surge, told the court.
At the peak, roughly 3,000 extra ICE and more than 1,000 CBP agents and officers were assigned to Operation Metro Surge.
They made 4,000 arrests during the two months of the operation.
A large portion of the extra personnel were called in to provide security for those who were making arrests. Federal officials said they had to tap the extra manpower because local police were refusing to respond to unruly demonstrations.
After two Americans were killed by Homeland Security personnel in January, President Trump deployed his border czar, Tom Homan, to fix things.
Mr. Homan said he would withdraw people, but only if local authorities did more to turn over people from their prisons and jails — and if local authorities would respond to violent anti-ICE demonstrations.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday complained about the hundreds of personnel still in his state.
“It is not over,” he said during testimony to Congress about fraud in his state food assistance and Medicaid programs.
“Minnesotans are still experiencing this,” he said. “It’s bad for our communities and makes our people less safe. It’s terrorizing our streets.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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