Latest news with #GlennValleyFoods
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
US ICE agents took half their workforce. What do they do now?
They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage . Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha , pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totalling the latest production numbers. 'Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,' he said. For more than a decade, Glenn Valley's production reports had told a story of a steady ascent – new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 per cent. Most of the workforce was gone. READ MORE Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska. Hartmann (52), folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence. 'So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,' he said. 'It's a wipeout,' said Gary Rohwer, the owner. 'We're building back up from ground zero.' [ Deportation anxiety in Irish America: 'I would have a clean slate before travelling' Opens in new window ] Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods, at his office in Omaha. Photograph: Erin Schaff/New York Times Trump target It had been three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory's door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification – part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president's advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests a day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the US economy . Trump had vowed to pursue 'bloodthirsty criminals' during his campaign, but he had also promised the 'largest mass deportation in history,' which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the workforce was foreign-born. Rohwer (84), had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump's treatment of immigrants. He couldn't square the government's accusations of 'criminal dishonesty' with the employees he'd known for decades as 'salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,' he said. 'There are some jobs Americans don't want to do,' Gary Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ The New York Times Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention, asking for legal advice. Their children, US citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company's frozen steak. [ Significant rise in Irish people seeking State help to avoid US deportation Opens in new window ] 'I'm still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,' Rohwer said. 'We need more people trained and ready to go.' He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 (€17) and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory. Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of 'stealing American jobs'. But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 jobs. Almost every one of the company's new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant. 'There are some jobs Americans don't want to do,' Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. 'We're caught up in a broken system.' The department of homeland security had accused many of the company's former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn't always catch if the ID number itself was valid. When Rohwer met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up. 'They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,' Rohwer said. 'But we're already doing that,' Hartmann said. 'How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?' Hiring process Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company's newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno's second day as the human resources director. Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods, with Alfredo Moreno, his new HR director. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ New York Times He still didn't have an office and he'd never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review. 'How many people did you lose total?' Moreno asked. Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. 'They arrested 76, which doesn't include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,' he said. 'How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?' 'I think I can help you with that part,' Moreno said. He had spent the past 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the midwest, and he'd shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem. Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and social security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work. In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications. Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinise IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren't fake, and interview each potential employee in person. He had memorised regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about their documentation. The ICE raid happened on June 10th, a Tuesday morning. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ The New York Times 'I ask where they were born, what town, where they travelled,' Moreno said. 'Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don't want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.' 'Yes. I like that,' Hartmann said. 'Because we can't go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.' The ICE raid Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years. More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7am. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door. He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces. [ Irish tech worker detained by immigration agents in US for 100 days: 'I didn't know when I was getting home' Opens in new window ] His first thought was that maybe one employee had got into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. 'We're going to be busy here,' one of the agents said. They moved past Hartmann into the factory, shouting instructions in Spanish, telling workers to come out with their hands up. Most complied, but a few dozen people started to scream and run. A group of five women clambered up stacks of packing pallets. Other workers enclosed themselves inside industrial freezers, only emerging after they lost feeling in their arms and hands. Hartmann saw a maintenance worker named Marvin Zepeda (37), scamper into the rafters with his tool belt. Zepeda was responsible for cleaning offices, and his colleagues had once nominated him for employee of the month because of his ability to laugh and tell jokes even while checking mousetraps. Now Zepeda squeezed into a crawl space in the ceiling and resisted orders to come out, holding agents off by displaying his box cutter and other tools. An agent shot him with a Taser. Zepeda pulled the probes out of his leg, retreated farther into the crawl space and threw tools in the direction of the agents. They shocked him again and threatened to send in a dog. Finally, a factory manager went into the crawl space, calmed Zepeda down and helped persuade him to surrender. Agents restrained his wrists and led him out of the factory. Zepeda spotted Hartmann in the lobby and flashed him a smile and a thumbs-up as the agents walked him toward a bus with the windows blacked out. 'The whole thing just gutted me, and obviously I had it easy,' Hartmann told Moreno. 'It's terrible for everyone,' Moreno said. 'I've seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.' 'The ripple effects,' Hartmann said, nodding. He pulled up a roster of the company's former employees and started to read through names: Ruiz. Gonzalez. Hernandez. Rodriguez. 'That's the part I keep thinking about,' Hartmann said. 'What happens to these people?' The son of a meatpacking worker who has been detained since a major raid at her plant in Omaha takes a call from her. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ The New York Times Detention centre It had taken three days for Elizabeth Rodriguez's family to figure out where she was. Her children had seen the raid on Facebook and watched videos that showed Rodriguez (46), being marched on to a bus in her factory smock and hard hat. Her eldest son, Omar (23), searched detention records and contacted her co-workers, police and local politicians. 'Where are they taking her?' he kept asking, until his mother finally called from a detention centre across the state. 'This call will be limited to 15 minutes,' a recording warned, and his life had been revolving around those phone calls ever since. Now, Omar felt his phone ringing again in his pocket and checked the number. 'Mom Jail,' the caller ID read. He answered and waited for the line to connect. His parents had spent the past 25 years in Omaha, building a life with such care and stability that to Omar it started to feel 'normal, even stable,' he said. His parents met in Mexico and eventually crossed the border together on foot in their teens. They married in Nebraska, found work and bought a small house on the outskirts of downtown where they could raise their four children, all US citizens. A few months earlier, Omar had encouraged his mother to hire a lawyer to help her explore a path to citizenship. She had a 'perfect case,' the lawyer wrote: No criminal record. Long-standing ties to the community. A steady job with good reviews. She took on extra hours to pay legal fees and nursed sores on her feet. It wasn't in her nature to complain, not even now, about the raid, the detention centre or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach. 'How are you?' Omar asked in Spanish, once Elizabeth came on the line. Her children crowded on to the couch and gathered around the phone. 'I'm fine,' she said. 'Tell me about all of you. Are you eating? Sleeping?' 'Don't worry,' Omar said. 'Everything's OK.' This was how they survived these calls: each side reassuring the other even as they continued to unravel. Omar was working the graveyard shift at a call centre to help pay for groceries. His two younger sisters, aged 17 and 13, were trying to cook for the family from their mother's recipes. Omar's younger brother, aged seven, was waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking, until Omar took him to the emergency room. Doctors said he was suffering from panic attacks. He had never spent a night away from Elizabeth, and he didn't understand what it meant to be detained or deported for lacking legal status. The family had decided it was best to tell him that his mother was still at work. 'I'll be home soon,' she told him now. 'When?' he asked. 'I don't know yet,' she said. 'I'm trying my best.' 'You have five minutes remaining on this call,' the automated voice said. Omar took the phone so they could talk through the logistics of her case. She had declined the government's offer of $1,000 (€859) and a free plane ticket to self-deport back to Mexico. Omar was trying to come up with $5,000 (€4,293) to pay for her bond so she could be released to her family while her deportation case played out in the courts. They had all begun drafting letters to submit on her behalf. Omar's oldest sister, 17, had written about how her mother had supported her through episodes of depression, helping her find a therapist and switch schools. 'I am still alive because of my mother,' she wrote to the judge. 'Now that she's gone, it's like I'm breaking a little more every day. I fear what will happen to us if she can't come home.' 'You have one minute remaining,' the automated voice said. 'Are you still there?' Omar asked. 'Yes. I'm here. I love all of you,' she said, and the children took turns saying goodbye. 'Everything is going to work out,' Omar told her, but the line was already dead. Daisy Hernandez, a manager at Glenn Valley Foods. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ The New York Times Skeleton crew The factory was empty. The machines sat silent. Back orders continued to pile up as a skeleton crew arrived at 7am to restart the manufacturing lines. Hartmann walked through the lobby, handing out coffees and greeting eight new employees who were reporting for their first day. They had been interviewed and hired, but they couldn't start until they were authorised to work through E-Verify, so a manager named Daisy Hernandez took their IDs and I-9 forms into her office and started punching in the numbers. None of the eight new hires were US citizens. They had submitted paperwork based on green cards, alien registration numbers, temporary visas and work authorisations. Hernandez tried to log into E-Verify, but her password didn't work. She tried again, and the account was locked. 'How's it going?' Hartmann asked, as he stopped by her office, but the answer was implied: the new employees were playing games on their phones in the break room. The manufacturing lines were falling further behind. Hernandez called Glenn Valley's former HR manager for help, and a few minutes later Hernandez was logged back into the account. She typed a new set of names into the same system and checked the first employee. 'The information entered did not match DHS records.' 'Down to seven,' Hernandez said. She set the application to the side and moved on to the next. 'Alien authorised to work,' it said. Cruz. Rivas. Lopez. Dominguez. 'Authorised to work,' it said, and even if the system had failed them before, it was still what the government suggested they use. Hernandez printed out a batch of company IDs and brought them into the break room, where seven new employees were waiting for their final words of training. 'Thanks for being here in our time of need,' Hartmann said, as he glanced around the room, registering all the people who were still missing. 'We want to thank you for joining our family.' A manager briefed the employees on food safety and handed out white smocks and construction hats. Then he opened the factory door to a rush of cold air and the clatter of machines. The workers lined up alongside a company slogan printed at the entrance. 'Together we achieve more,' it read, and they stepped on to the factory floor. This article originally appeared in The New York Times . An employee at the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska. Photograph: Erin Schaff/ The New York Times
New York Times
3 days ago
- New York Times
ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. 'Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,' he said. For more than a decade, Glenn Valley's production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska. Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence. 'So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,' he said. 'It's a wipeout,' said Gary Rohwer, the owner. 'We're building back up from ground zero.' It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory's door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president's advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the American economy. Trump had vowed to pursue 'blood-thirsty criminals' during his campaign, but he had also promised the 'largest mass deportation in history,' which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the work force was foreign-born. Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he'd voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump's treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn't square the government's accusations of 'criminal dishonesty' with the employees he'd known for decades as 'salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,' he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice. Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company's frozen steak. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
NBC News
26-06-2025
- NBC News
How a Nebraska immigration raid tied to an identity theft investigation unfolded
In Nebraska, the state's largest worksite immigration raid sent a chilling effect across the city of Omaha this month when federal immigration authorities arrested 76 employees of a meatpacking plant. About a dozen of them have already been deported or transferred to out-of-state custody. Sixty-three others remain in immigration custody at the Lincoln County Detention Center in Nebraska. Federal authorities accuse the workers of using stolen identities from U.S. citizens to unlawfully gain employment at Glenn Valley Foods, a meatpacking plant that has been processing boxed beef for more than 15 years. The Center for Immigrant Refugee and Advancement, an immigrant rights organization in Omaha, provided legal consultations to most of them. Anne Wurth, the group's associate legal director, told NBC News they are 'honest, hardworking individuals in our community" who have also been victims of an immigration system that 'does not provide enough pathways' to remain in the country legally. "That's not true," said Elhrick Cerdan, the assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Nebraska, who led the enforcement operation at Glenn Valley Foods. In an interview, Cerdan rejected 'this narrative that these hardworking illegal immigrants were just doing their daily job and trying to earn wages." "They were stealing the identities of over a hundred U.S. citizens," Cerdan said. Seven people have been charged in connection with the events surrounding the raid at Glenn Valley Foods. Only one of them faces charges of using someone else's Social Security number, court records showed as of Wednesday. 'That number could change,' Cerdan said, because the investigation continues. Four protesters, including two U.S. citizens who worked at the plant, face charges accusing them of jumping on law enforcement vehicles as they escorted detainees out of the facility, according to court records. A Honduran national was charged with resisting arrest and displaying a box cutter when agents tried to apprehend him. A Mexican national is charged with unlawful re-entry into the United States. An employee who was arrested was charged with false representation of a Social Security number. The rest of the detainees face immigration proceedings, according to Cerdan and Wurth. "Those individuals are still in detention, and they're sitting there waiting for their day in court," Wurth said, adding that many of them have bond hearings scheduled for next month. Inside the Homeland Security operation Cerdan had been investigating a large-scale identity theft scheme in Omaha for three months when he showed up at Glenn Valley Foods on June 10 to execute a civil search warrant alongside dozens of other federal officers. 'That day, the biggest concern was officer safety and the safety of the people in that location, whether they were victims, criminals or witnesses,' Cerdan said in a video call Monday. 'That's why we had an overwhelming number of federal, state and local law enforcement present there.' Asked how the alleged identity fraud scheme worked, Cerdan declined to provide specific details to protect his investigation. But generally, he said, victims of identity theft lose their information through spam texts, phone calls and emails, as well as illegitimate websites posing as banks or cyberattacks. Often, the information is sold online or on the dark web by a broker or a 'dealer of stolen identities,' he said. Four videos from inside the meat processing facility obtained by NBC News show several agents with their faces covered, wearing tactical gear and asking people for their immigration papers or proof of U.S. citizenship in Spanish. Workers are on edge and scared as some of their colleagues are put in handcuffs and escorted out. Two other videos from outside Glenn Valley Foods obtained by NBC News show groups of officers, agents and law enforcement vehicles surrounding the plant. The videos also capture family members showing up at the facility to bring documents on behalf of their relatives. Protesters also show up. It took federal authorities four hours to safely conduct employment authorization audits of every worker at the plant, according to Cerdan and the U.S. attorney's office in Nebraska. Homeland Security agents identified 76 employees at Glenn Valley Foods who lacked valid work authorizations, according to the U.S. attorney's office. 'These workers were using Social Security numbers that had not been issued to them,' U.S. Attorney Lesley A. Woods said. Based on the findings of the audit, 'a large number of suspected fraudulent identification documents' was uncovered, Woods said. 'Multiple identities of United States citizens were being fraudulently used by workers at that location.' Cerdan said workers at Glenn Valley Foods were using the identities of 100 U.S. citizens — most of them of Latino heritage and from multiple states. 'These victims have experienced tremendous loss because of reported wages that they did not earn,' he said. Cerdan said some victims lost federal student aid, as well as disability and health insurance benefits, because "all of a sudden they've made too much income." Others had unpaid parking and speeding tickets that didn't belong to them recorded on their driver's licenses, Cerdan said. Others are being charged taxes "after their income was falsely increased," according to the Department of Homeland Security. Every employee at Glenn Valley Foods, including those who were detained, was approved through E-Verify, the company's president, Chad Hartmann, told NBC News. DHS operates the E-Verify system in partnership with the Social Security Administration to let employers know whether prospective employees have legal authorization to work in the United States. 'That system doesn't capture a solution if somebody's got a fake ID. That's what needs to be repaired,' Hartmann said this month. Cerdan declined to respond to Hartmann's comment, saying E-Verify is run by Immigration and Citizenship Services, another office within DHS. Wurth said "it indicates a larger conversation that still needs to be had about reform of the immigration system," particularly when it comes to work permits in industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor. Cerdan said his investigation will continue with a focus on identifying more victims, as well as brokers who may have sold the identities to workers at Glenn Valley Foods.
Fox News
20-06-2025
- Fox News
Massive identity theft scheme led by illegal immigrants uncovered after raid at meatpacking plant
ICE has uncovered a massive identity theft scheme led by illegal immigrants and possibly tied to organized criminal networks following a workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Omaha. According to an ICE statement, approximately 70 illegal aliens working at the plant were discovered to be using stolen Social Security numbers and identities to unlawfully obtain employment authorization, wages and benefits at the expense of over 100 victims. The statement said that the victims have faced "devastating financial, emotional and legal consequences" as a result of the identity theft. Working with other federal and state partners, ICE agents conducted a major workplace raid at Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha on June 10. The raid resulted in over 70 illegal immigrants being arrested, which sparked protests both in the community and across the country. While the arrests have sparked outrage from some in both the local community and nationally, ICE said the illegals' identity theft proves they were not innocent, hardworking members of society, as some have suggested. Another ICE representative told Fox News Digital that the illegal aliens who were apprehended at Glenn Valley Foods were behind the crime and that "some may have used organized criminal networks" to carry out the crime. The representative said that the investigation is still ongoing and that the exact number of individuals impacted is still unknown. The ICE spokesperson pointed to a few examples of those victimized by the apprehended illegals' identity theft scheme. The spokesperson said a disabled person in Texas, who was unable to work, struggled to get their Social Security disability payments because an illegal alien was fraudulently using their identity and earning wages at Glenn Valley Foods. Another victim in Colorado received a notice from the IRS to repay more than $5,000 after their income was falsely increased due to an illegal alien using their identity to work at the plant. In Missouri, a full-time nursing student lost their college tuition assistance because it was fraudulently reported that they earned too much money due to an illegal alien at Glenn Valley Foods using their Social Security number. Another person living in California has had to work for nearly 15 years to regain their identity and fix the financial damage done by an illegal who was working at Glenn Valley Foods, according to the spokesperson. Mark Zito, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations Kansas City, which covers Omaha, said in a statement emailed to Fox News Digital that "the criminals who stole these identities didn't just break the law, they upended lives." "There have been individuals who have gone on the record recently referring to the identity thieves we arrested last week as 'good, hardworking, and honest,'" he said. "These so-called honest workers have caused an immeasurable amount of financial and emotional hardship for innocent Americans. If pretending to be someone you aren't in order to steal their lives isn't blatant, criminal dishonesty, I don't know what is." "These victims aren't faceless statistics; they're real people who are being denied healthcare and have lost educational opportunities," added Zito.
Malay Mail
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Malay Mail
Trump's immigration crackdown: Arrests, deportations and border security by the numbers
WASHINGTON, June 19 — US President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the US illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since January 20. Arrests Trump won back the White House promising record numbers of deportations. A Trump administration budget document published last week said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement aimed to deport 1 million immigrants per year. ICE has cast a wider net than under former President Joe Biden's Democratic administration, picking up more non-criminals and people with final deportation orders, including those coming to ICE offices for routine check-ins. ICE arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of violating immigration law from January 20 to the first week of June, according to the White House. The figure amounts to an average of 750 arrests per day — double the average over the past decade. Federal agents stand with workers during a raid by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a Glenn Valley Foods meat production plant in Omaha, Nebraska June 10, 2025 in a still image from video. — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement handout pic via Reuters Still, the pace of arrests remains far short of what Trump would need to deport millions of people. Top White House official Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration agenda, pressed ICE to escalate operations in late May. Miller set a quota for at least 3,000 arrests per day and told ICE leadership they should target anyone without legal status. The increased enforcement led to protests in Los Angeles and other cities. ICE last week ordered officers to generally refrain from immigration sweeps at farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants, but the Washington Post reported on Monday that the agency had rescinded the order. Detention ICE statistics show the number of people arrested by ICE with no other criminal charges or convictions and then detained rose from about 860 in January to 7,800 this month — an increase of more than 800 per cent. Those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions also rose, but at a lower rate of 91 per cent. ICE had more than 51,000 immigrants in custody as of June 1, well beyond its funded capacity of 41,500. A sweeping tax and spending bill passed by the US House of Representatives in May would devote an estimated US$150 billion to immigration enforcement. The massive funding boost would cover a White House request for 100,000 detention beds, according to analyses of the legislation. A worker has their fingerprints checked electronically during a raid by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a Glenn Valley Foods meat production plant in Omaha, Nebraska June 10, 2025 in a still image from video. — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement handout pic via Reuters Deportations The Trump administration has struggled to increase deportation levels even as it has opened new pathways to send migrants to countries other than their home country, such as sending Venezuelans to Mexico, El Salvador or Panama. Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said in late May that the administration had deported around 200,000 people over four months. The total appeared to lag deportations during a similar period under Biden, whose administration had 257,000 deportations from February-May 2024, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics. Biden's administration faced much higher levels of illegal immigration and quickly deported many of those crossing illegally, boosting deportation totals. DHS stopped issuing detailed statistical reports on immigration enforcement after Trump took office, which makes it harder to gauge the scope of the crackdown. Stripping legal status The Supreme Court in May allowed the Trump administration to proceed with terminating Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Venezuelans, paving the way for Trump to terminate it for other nations. TPS provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the US if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. The Trump administration rolled back a Biden-era extension of TPS for 521,000 Haitians so that it could expire in early August. The administration also ended the status for thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon, moves that take effect in the coming weeks. The Supreme Court earlier this month let the Trump administration proceed with stripping legal status from half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who entered under a Biden-era 'parole' programme. Trump said in March that he was weighing a similar move to revoke parole for Ukrainians. The administration in April began notifying people who entered legally under Biden using an app known as CBP One that their status had been revoked. A soldier walks past a warning sign marking a restricted area near the US-Mexico border, as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration and following the establishment of a 260-mile military zone along the US southern border in New Mexico and Texas, in El Paso, Texas May 22, 2025. — Reuters pic Border security Trump issued a series of executive orders when he returned to the White House, implementing a broad ban on asylum for migrants encountered at the southern border and sending in troops to assist border security efforts. His measures built on some initiatives already under way by the end of Biden's tenure, including a similar asylum ban and a push to increase Mexican enforcement. The policies appear to have successfully reduced traffic. US Border Patrol arrested 8,300 migrants at the southern border in February, US government figures show, the lowest monthly level since 2000. Monthly figures are not available prior to 2000. The number of arrests in March and April was similar, showing a sustained drop. Migrant arrests are often used as a proxy to estimate illegal crossings although some migrants enter undetected. The February arrest total was a steep drop from the 141,000 migrants picked up in February 2024 before Trump returned to office and down from 29,000 in January, according to US government figures. — Reuters
