LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Immigration officers are falling short of President Trump's expectations for mass detentions and deportations of people in the U.S. without legal status, even though arrests are up compared to daily averages during the Biden administration. We're going to take the pulse now from two parts of the country, starting with Lionel Ramos of member station KOSU in Oklahoma City.
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LIONEL RAMOS, BYLINE: The quiet churn of an office printer is the sound of one Oklahoma community preparing for the worst. Last month, hundreds of people in South Oklahoma City's predominantly Latino immigrant community attended a legal clinic hosted by the local Latino Legislative Caucus.
MICHAEL BROOKS: And so we've got 25 stations here with volunteers, mostly college and law students.
RAMOS: That's state Senator Michael Brooks. He leads a Latino caucus and is also an immigration attorney. In all, Brooks said volunteers helped more than 350 people without legal status plan for the possibility that federal immigration agents could detain and deport them - people such as Elena Rios. She's a local public school janitor and a single mother of five.
The 40-year-old says she fled Mexico after losing her husband to violence and has been in the U.S. without legal status for about six years. She says the Trump administration's crackdown has her in a panic.
ELENA RIOS: (Through interpreter) First, you get stressed out, and then you start to become desperate, because you come here for something better for your children, only to find yourself stumbling again like this.
RAMOS: She's looking to assign temporary guardianship of her children to someone in case she is detained. It's still unclear the degree to which the number of federal immigration arrests and detentions is up in Oklahoma. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt launched Operation Guardian in November, focusing on the 500-plus incarcerated individuals without legal status in the state's prison system.
It also calls for a federal partnership aimed at deputizing state agents to carry out immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, Oklahoma state school superintendent Ryan Walters says he wants to allow federal authorities into schools to detain students whose parents are already in the custody of immigration authorities.
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RYAN WALTERS: If that's what President Trump sees fit, as there's alien immigrant population there that needs to have enforcement to remove them from the schools, absolutely. We will work with him to make sure that he's able to carry that out.
RAMOS: Plucking children out of schools, Superintendent Walters says, is about keeping families together. But Governor Stitt, who supports getting tough on migrant criminals, says that the school idea goes too far. Stitt said using children as, quote, "political pawns" does not help public safety.
For NPR News, I'm Lionel Ramos in Oklahoma City.
ALLISON SHERRY, BYLINE: And I'm Allison Sherry in Denver. In Colorado, there is a state law that prohibits county and local police officers from taking part in immigration enforcement. So ICE here has had to rely on federal officers. And since Trump's inauguration, those officers have depicted these immigration raids as vital to public safety. So they say they're going in to bust drug dealers. They use flash grenades and battering rams. They detain a bunch of people.
CALEB VITELLO: We're here today to conduct an at-large enforcement operation, looking for Tren de Aragua, the gang members here from Venezuela. I want to thank our interagency partners. We've got U.S. marshals. We've got FBI. We've got DEA.
SHERRY: That's ICE's acting director, Caleb Vitello, who came to the Denver suburb of Aurora recently for a large-scale immigration action with an array of federal officers.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: One goal was clearly achieved, creating fear and uncertainty in immigrant communities that deportations could happen at any time.
SHERRY: But despite local and national TV cameras and big military-style vehicles and warrants signed by judges, most of the people picked up in these raids have yet to be charged with any federal crimes. In Aurora, federal agents ended up detaining about 30 people, and only one was a gang member, according to the president's border czar, Tom Homan. He told Fox News that the action wasn't very successful because someone leaked the information to the media.
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TOM HOMAN: This is serious business, and they need to stop or we're going to prosecute them through the Department of Justice.
SHERRY: Since January, only a few of those rounded up have faced federal criminal charges, not for serious drug or gun crimes, but for re-entering the country after being deported, which is usually a misdemeanor. Laura Lunn is an attorney who advocates for detainees at ICE facilities.
LAURA LUNN: I've been doing this work for 14 years. Never have I seen a case where a judge signed a warrant to go pick up somebody who's being charged with illegal re-entry where their front door is blown off of the hinges.
SHERRY: Because federal authorities haven't been transparent about who they've detained, it's been impossible to verify whether the people in custody have criminal records. At least three people in the country with work authorizations from Mauritania were swept up in these sweeps, according to lawyers and family members. Mamadou Dia knows the three detained. He says all three were seeking asylum and were on their way to work.
MAMADOU DIA: Peaceful people who's not committing any crime here, like, seek freedom that this country has to give, if they were picked up without any charges.
SHERRY: Advocates call this raids without records because there's been little to no information about who's in detention, what the warrants are for or whether those in custody even had a criminal background.
For NPR News, I'm Allison Sherry in Denver.
FADEL: OK. To unpack what we just heard, we're joined by NPR's Joel Rose, who covers immigration. Hey, Joel.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: OK. So both of those reports suggest that President Trump's immigration crackdown is running into some challenges.
ROSE: Yeah. Now, it is only a month into the administration, right?
FADEL: Right.
ROSE: I should say that first. But so far, we have seen some gaps between the narrative that the administration is pushing and the reality on the ground. The narrative is that the president is delivering on his campaign promise to build the biggest mass deportation operation in U.S. history. Here is part of a TV ad released this week by the Department of Homeland Security featuring Secretary Kristi Noem.
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KRISTI NOEM: President Trump has a clear message for those that are in our country illegally. Leave now. If you don't, we will find you and we will deport you. You will never return.
ROSE: But the reality in recent weeks is that ICE has not been able to deliver the arrest numbers that the White House wants.
FADEL: OK.
ROSE: Trump officials say they want to see 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day, at a minimum. And for a while in January, ICE was publishing numbers every day that showed it was nearly reaching those goals. But according to data published by DHS, that number dipped at the end of January to fewer than a thousand per day, and in the first week of February, it was below 600 per day, and we are seeing some frustration about that from the administration.
FADEL: So what do we know about who the administration's arresting?
ROSE: Not a lot. The White House says it has been focused on arresting immigrants with criminal records, but the administration has released virtually no information about the people, for example, that it sent to the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including their names. So it's virtually impossible to verify those claims.
FADEL: NPR's Joel Rose. Thank you, Joel.
ROSE: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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