CHICAGO – Newly released data shows that Operation Midway Blitz led to the deportation of nearly 2,500 immigrants — most of them with no criminal record — during last fall’s immigration enforcement surge that fueled massive protests and led to two shootings, one deadly.

A Tribune analysis of the data, released Monday, offers the first comprehensive look to date of the roughly 3,800 people detained and what happened to them after they were picked up in the two-month operation that included often-masked and heavily militarized agents using forceful tactics during their controversial roundups that spurred chaos-filled scenes and led court orders to limit agents’ unconstitutional actions.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the Tribune’s analysis but in the past has lauded the operation as part of what it characterized as “a historic win in the fight against violent criminal illegal alien crime.” Critics have called the operation a massive unconstitutional overreach that foretold of the chaos in Minneapolis — where a similar crackdown spiraled into agents killing two protesters and prompted President Donald Trump to suggest a “softer touch” going forward.

In some ways, the latest data released on Operation Midway Blitz confirms what has already largely been gleaned through earlier data releases and court records: that the Trump administration’s insistence it was targeting the “worst of the worst” conflicted with a reality of arrests of mostly those with no criminal record.

But the data also offers a first, full accounting of the operation, with some new details on who was commonly targeted. That includes how the second administration of Trump — elected after a controversial wave of asylum seekers from Central and South America were admitted into the country under President Joe Biden — often used federal agents to round up native Mexicans in the Chicago area, typically snagging those in their 40s or older.

Here’s what the newest data shows:

How many people were detained?

DHS said in mid-December that Operation Midway Blitz had ensnared “more than 4,500,” but it has refused to release details of the vast majority of those it said it has arrested. What it has released shows a broad definition of what it includes in the number of those arrested, such as counting truckers arrested by Indiana State Police working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The newly released ICE data — provided under a public records request to the research group Deportation Data Project — offers a more precise way to arrive at a figure for the Chicago area. The Tribune analyzed the raw, case-level data to study those booked by federal agents into ICE’s processing center in Broadview or its South Loop office.

In that more narrow look, the analysis found 3,790 bookings from the day the operation was announced, Sept. 8, until the day the main surge began winding down, Nov. 10. The data shows another 130 detentions during a three-day December surge when then-border patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino briefly returned to Chicago. Since then, the level of detentions has slowed closer to levels seen during earlier months of Trump’s second administration before the blitz was announced.

What were their criminal backgrounds?

When Trump’s DHS announced the operation, it said it would “target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” and then named 11 of the “worst of the worst” that it said were “at large” after Illinois’ so-called sanctuary policies required their release from jails and prisons, against ICE’s request to hold for deportation. The Tribune found one DHS news release that mentioned ICE had arrested one of the 11. DHS refuses to release lists of all those it has arrested, and when asked earlier this year how many of the 11 had been arrested, DHS did not respond.

What data is available shows the vast majority of those arrested in the operation had no known criminal record. The released data does not include names of those detained, but each time someone is booked, ICE categorizes the person’s criminal history. The Tribune analysis found that — of all those detained — 60% had no criminal history, similar to previous findings for the first half of the blitz’s main phase.

The analysis found that, for sure, the daily pace of detentions exploded under Trump, skyrocketing during Operation Midway Blitz to nearly 30 times the pace of Biden’s last year in office. But as Trump’s DHS swelled its immigration jails, significantly smaller shares of those were people with any type of criminal conviction — dropping from at least half the people detained during Biden’s last year to just 15% during the Operation Midway Blitz’s main surge.

Focusing just on those with listed criminal convictions, the analysis found that, during Operation Midway Blitz’s main surge, DHS did double the pace of detentions of immigrants with violent felony or sex convictions, compared to Biden’s last year. But the vast majority of those detained with convictions during the operation were for other types of crimes. And since the main surge ended, the pace of arrests of immigrants with violent felony or sex convictions has dropped to levels near Biden’s last year in office.

What were their nationalities?

The Biden administration saw a different kind of chaos — with the number of people crossing into the United States reaching record levels, more than double Trump’s first term, who were mostly seeking asylum in an already backlogged system. Cities like Chicago — long a haven for Mexican immigrants with ties to families and a community — became landing spots for migrants from increasingly impoverished and authoritarian places such as Venezuela.

The politics helped elect Trump, with his pledge of mass deportations winning support among even some longtime Mexican immigrants who felt forgotten by Democrats who’d lavished attention, money and work permits on new arrivals.

But much of DHS’s enforcement centered in Little Village, known as the Mexico of the Midwest, where protesters regularly confronted agents, including a time Bovino was chided by a federal judge for being misleading or “outright lying” about why he hurled a tear gas canister into a crowd of protesters in violation of a prior court order.

The data analysis shows the operation detained undocumented Mexican immigrants more than any other nationality — with more than three times as many Mexican immigrants detained than those from Venezuela.

Digging deeper into the data on Mexican nationals, the analysis found that most detained were in their 40s or older. Four were in their 70s, with no listed criminal history. ICE’s data doesn’t list how many years each detainee had been in the country before being arrested. But ICE data also shows that the age group most likely to be arrested at the border are those in their 20s, suggesting many of the Mexican nationals ensnared in the Chicago operation had been in the country for years, if not decades.

The data does show a fraction of detained Mexicans –— 32 of 1,797 — had convictions for violent felony or sex crimes, the type of immigrants lacking legal status that the Trump administration had said it was targeting. But still most of those booked — 850 — had no criminal record. And of other nationalities detained, even smaller slivers had any violent felony or sex convictions, and higher percentages had no known criminal records. Of the 50 detainees listed as citizens of Kyrgyzstan, for example, none had any criminal conviction; at best, five had pending charges while the rest had no criminal history.

Who’s been deported so far?

This can be harder to answer because the data is accurate as of March 10, and some deportations don’t occur until months after someone is detained. That said, the analysis documented the deportations of at least 2,479 who had been detained during the main surge of Operation Midway Blitz.

Most of those deported were Mexican nationals.

Also, just like with who was detained, the ranks of those deported were mostly people with no criminal record — nearly 60% of all those deported who were detained during the main surge of Operation Midway Blitz. A fourth of deportees had a pending charge, while less than a fifth of those deportees had a criminal conviction, and just a small fraction of those had a conviction for a violent felony or sex crime. Another way to think of it: For every blitz deportee with a violent felony or sex conviction, roughly 44 blitz deportees had no criminal record.

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