By Alma Plus Online, September 6, 2026
The U.S. government’s immigration crackdown has caused a surge in arrests of people with no criminal record and is affecting asylum seekers and families. Donald Trump’s immigration policy has led to an increase in arrests of people with no criminal record in the United States.
Donald Trump promised an immigration crackdown targeting dangerous criminals, but the figures from his own administration tell a different story. According to a report published by the American Immigration Council in January 2026, arrests of people with no criminal record increased by 2,450% during his first year in office, driven by mobile patrols, workplace raids, and re-detentions of those attending court hearings or follow-up appointments.
The percentage of detainees without a criminal record rose from 6% in January 2025 to 41% in December. Today, more than 56,000 people are locked up in a system with a capacity of 40,000, spread across more than 100 facilities that did not exist at the beginning of the year.
The stories documented by the U.S. press in recent months paint a clear and counterintuitive picture. Those detained are not the ones who were hiding from the system, but precisely those who were presenting themselves to it: Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Guatemalans, and Mexicans with active asylum applications, who attended every hearing and processed documents for their U.S. citizen children.
Following the rules made them easier to find.
No image summed up that paradox better than that of a five-year-old boy in a suburb of Minneapolis.
The Blue Bunny Hat
The photograph shows a boy wearing a plaid coat, a school backpack, and a blue knitted hat with bunny ears. He is surrounded by masked federal agents; one of them is holding his backpack while helping him climb into a black van covered in snow.
His name is Liam Conejo Ramos; he is Ecuadorian, and on the afternoon of January 20, 2026, he was walking home from preschool at Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights. He was with his dad.
The family had arrived in the United States in 2024 from Ecuador; they had an active asylum application, and, according to their attorney, there was no deportation order against them at the time of the arrest.
His case had been formally filed with the immigration court since December of that year. Even so, Liam and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Ramos, ended up that night on a plane bound for the family detention center in Dilley, Texas—more than 2,000 kilometers from their home. His mother, Érika Ramos, was pregnant and inside their home.
Eleven days later, Federal Judge Fred Biery ordered their release. He signed his ruling and included a photograph of the boy in the blue hat. By then, Liam was the fourth student in the Columbia Heights school district to be detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and in the courtyard at Dilley, dozens of detained children had staged a protest, chanting a single word: “Freedom.”
In Minneapolis, neighbors began folding origami rabbits in solidarity.
Detained Simply for Showing Up
The tactic that explains much of the statistical spike has a cruel irony: detaining people in the very place where they were required to appear. Jorge Valera fled violence perpetrated by criminal groups in Peru in 2022 and had been in the United States for nearly three years. When he arrived, federal agents briefly detained him and released him on his own recognizance, with a summons to appear.
Since then, according to his habeas corpus petition, he diligently attended each and every one of his hearings. He was arrested at one of them—at the immigration court in San Francisco—and sent to a detention center in Arizona.
“I was never treated like this in my own country—like a criminal. They shackled my feet. I’m not a criminal; I’m not a murderer.”
— Jorge Valera, a Peruvian asylum seeker, to NBC Bay Area
A federal judge ordered his release a week later. In Sacramento, a Guatemalan man named Juan suffered a similar fate: he had been in the country for two years, his asylum application was pending, he had not missed a single hearing or check-in, and he had no criminal record. He left his court appearance in handcuffs.
Volunteers accompanied his wife, Maria, out of the federal building and showed her how to use the online detainee search tool to find out where he had been taken. That was all the support she received from the government.
In Buffalo, New York, 19-year-old Oliver Mata Velázquez was arrested when he showed up for his mandatory hearing, despite having entered the country legally and complied with every order while applying for citizenship; a federal court ordered his release, noting that “every day he is detained causes him harm.” And in Denver, a mother, a father, and their young son were detained as they left the courtroom, minutes after receiving a favorable ruling.
A work shift, a trip to the pharmacy, a baby’s passport
The others were caught up in their daily lives: in late January, a federal raid swept through the state of Maine, and attorney Robin Nice watched as, one after another, six of her clients—all with pending asylum applications and no criminal record—were taken into custody.
Some were finishing their work shifts; another was driving to work; another had gone out to buy medicine and food; and yet another was intercepted while going to apply for a U.S. passport for his newborn baby—he was detained while completing paperwork for his U.S. citizen son.
This is absolutely unprecedented. Until about six months ago, I felt confident telling my clients that if they had pending asylum applications, they shouldn’t worry about being detained.
— Robin Nice, immigration attorney in Maine, to NBC News
In California, Juan Carlos Mejía spent more than six months in detention. His attorney confirmed—and CNN independently verified—that he had no criminal record: just traffic tickets.
When a judge ordered his release on bail, his five children were waiting for him with signs posted in the kitchen. One, written in a child’s handwriting, read: “Thank you, God, for bringing him back to us.” Today, he wears an electronic ankle monitor that tracks his whereabouts at all times.
In Sunnyvale, a carpenter and father of a young girl was arrested in front of his family; according to court documents reviewed by the public broadcaster KQED, he suffered a heart attack and a stroke during the arrest.
And in August, in Austin, the scene repeated itself with almost unbearable symmetry: another five-year-old boy, also named Liam—Liam Tadeo—was detained alongside his father as they were on their way to a soccer game. A video circulating on social media shows him crying inconsolably as an agent escorts him away.
Not even a military uniform offers protection
The harm does not end in the cell; nearly 18,000 of the people detained by ICE in 2026 are parents of U.S. citizens, according to data compiled by Univisión.
An investigation by ProPublica found that more than half of those parents had no criminal convictions—just a traffic violation or an immigration offense.
And the dilemma they face is described by lawyers and organizations as blatantly coercive: either they self-deport, taking their children with them, or the children may end up in a federal shelter.
“To avoid separation, some parents have left the United States, even if they had an asylum application or another legal basis to remain in the country,” states one of the cited reports. The Department of Homeland Security denies that this constitutes a family separation policy and maintains that parents can choose to leave as a family or face the consequences.
Nor does having a child in the U.S. military offer protection. An exclusive investigation by the AP news agency documented that the crackdown detained more than 50 spouses and parents of members of the Armed Forces. Among them was the Mexican national Ramírez Zavala, who spent most of his life working as a farm laborer in rural Illinois.
His daughter spent hours refreshing web pages to track his transfer—from a county jail in Missouri to an ICE facility in Texas—until she learned, two weeks later, that he had already been deported to Mexico.
The agency never explained to the family why he was deported so quickly. His wife, a legal permanent resident for 30 years, is considering moving to Mexico with him; if she does and her daughter and son-in-law—both in the military—are deployed, there will be no one left to care for her two- and four-year-old grandchildren.
It’s the most frustrating and helpless feeling.
— Daughter of Ramírez Zavala, who was deported to Mexico, to the AP
A system built to deport, not to adjudicate
All these stories have something in common, and it’s not illegality—it’s the opposite. These are people who did exactly what the system asked of them.
They crossed at an official checkpoint using a government app, just like Liam’s family. They showed up for every hearing, just like Jorge and Juan. They filed paperwork for their U.S. citizen children, and it was precisely because they did so that it became easier to track them down. Immigration court, which should be the place where a case is resolved, has become the place where it is settled.
Data from the Deportation Data Project confirms the pattern: of the nearly 100,000 people arrested by ICE between 2017 and mid-2025, more than 70% had no criminal record, and only 7% of those detained had violent convictions.
“This is a system built to produce deportations, not justice,” summarized Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. Federal courts have been ruling in his favor: district judges have repeatedly issued orders preventing the government from detaining people with pending immigration proceedings without a prior hearing before an impartial adjudicator. The U.S. justice system itself notes that a significant portion of these arrests violates due process.
For Latin America, this is not foreign news. It is Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Guatemalans, and Mexicans who feature in these stories: people who left their countries driven by violence, poverty, or persecution, and who in many cases have been sustaining the U.S. economy with their labor for decades.
Their children were born there and are citizens; their families have been torn apart by a border. Liam Conejo Ramos, meanwhile, remains in Minneapolis; his asylum application was denied, and he is appealing the decision; the government is seeking to deport him. His family lives in a constant state of alert. “That feeling that we’re being hunted down,” his father described.
When CBS asked the boy what scares him the most, he replied with the devastating candor of a five-year-old: “immigration” (referring to ICE agents).
Source: Alma Plus TV, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US