cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/44805970

Collateral arrests make up around 35% of the 3,785 arrests recorded since the beginning of the surge in December. The portion of arrests that were collateral nearly doubled during the surge compared to previous months: From September to November, around 19% of the 528 arrests recorded in Minnesota were collateral.

In the first two weeks of the surge, federal immigration agents recorded more collateral arrests than targeted arrests.

It’s still unclear how reliable the label is. On Jan. 14, ICE agents mistook Alfredo Aljorna, a Venezuelan national, for another Latino man and pursued him on I-94. After the car chase, an ICE agent shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Federal agents detained Aljorna and Sosa-Celis, along with their partners and a man who lives in the same duplex.

None of the arrested people were the intended target of the ICE agents, but in the data, the arrest of a Venezuelan man whose age, arrest time and detention details matches Aljorna’s is labeled as “targeted.” The arrest of a man who appears to be Sosa-Celis is labeled as “collateral.” The remaining arrests do not clearly match any of the arrests in the data.

The data doesn’t include the arrests of U.S. citizens. Operation Metro Surge was initially purported to target Somali Minnesotans, the vast majority of whom are citizens. Agents mistook citizens for their targets and appeared to arrest citizens on the basis of their appearance; a federal judge in Minnesota found “compelling and troubling” evidence that federal agents racially profiled Somali and Latino residents.