Federal immigration sweep yields about 100 arrests in New York area, DEA says

Federal agents in recent days arrested about 100 immigrants in the metropolitan area, including on Long Island, during a sweep targeting those convicted or accused of crime and in the country illegally, according to the local Drug Enforcement Administration office.

Most of those arrested in the sweep, which involved multiple federal agencies between Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, were violent criminals, according to Frank A. Tarentino III, the special agent in charge of the DEA's New York Division. Some of those arrested may have had no connection to criminality but were violating immigration laws, he said.

DEA agents are among the federal authorities, also including those from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to have been granted immigration enforcement authority since President Donald Trump took office. Similar authority has been extended to 10 Nassau police detectives, county authorities announced earlier this week.

Last week, Trump's homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted pictures of herself in New York City at scenes of several of the arrests. She had donned tactical gear and said that "dirtbags" had been removed from the street.

Similar arrests have taken place in Chicago and Denver. 

These arrests of immigrants in the country illegally who have been accused of a crime or convicted of one have taken place under past presidential administrations, including hundreds of thousands of times under Joe Biden. But Trump has promised to ramp up such operations.

Tarentino didn't have specifics for comparison but said there already had been an increase under Trump.

"What's different is the urgency to remove criminal illegals, or violent illegal, criminal drug traffickers, without having to go through a six-, eight-, 10-, 12-month investigation," he said.

It's "quite possible" that some of those arrested during the sweep are not suspected or convicted criminals but had immigration violations and were detained for deportation proceedings, Tarentino said. That share of the arrestees is a minority of those detained during the sweep, he said.

Nationwide, a Trump official told NBC News at the start of the week of immigration sweeps, that nearly half of those arrested had no criminal record.

In New York, Tarentino said, there was at least one Long Island arrest — in Nassau.

The place with the biggest number of arrests was the Bronx, followed by Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, he said. The most common region the arrestees were originally from is Latin America.

A list of those detained, along with the accusations against them, was not disclosed, nor was where they're being detained.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.