Federal immigration authorities arrested at least 243 undocumented immigrants with varying criminal backgrounds in the Denver area in mid-July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday.
The agency provided limited information about most of those detained in the eight-day operation, which ended Sunday. The people arrested either had been sought in connection with or charged with crimes or had been convicted of offenses, the agency said in a statement.
ICE did not provide a breakdown of convictions or charges for most of those detained. It’s also unclear from the statement if the 243 announced arrests represented all of the immigrants detained in the operation, or just those who had some level of criminal background.
Steve Kotecki, a spokesman for the Denver ICE office, did not immediately return an email seeking comment Wednesday afternoon.
“By partnering with federal agencies, we have successfully apprehended individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety,” Robert Guadian, the official leading ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit in Denver, said in a statement.
The operation ran from July 12 through Sunday, the agency said, and resulted in arrests of immigrants from 17 countries. The release identifies six people who had been convicted of a crime, plus a seventh who’s facing felony charges for sex crimes. An eighth person named in the release was alleged to be a member of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
At least some of those people arrested in the operation were already in state custody. Rigoberto Carranza-Mendez, 47, matches the name of a person who was serving a 25-year sentence in state prison for a 2014 murder, according to court records. He has been since been deported to Mexico, ICE said.
Another man identified in the release as having been convicted on drug charges also appeared to be serving a prison sentence in Colorado, according to a state Department of Corrections database.
A message sent to the DOC was not immediately returned Wednesday.
A third listed man, who was convicted of careless driving resulting in death, had been sentenced to a six-month jail term earlier this year.
ICE’s Wednesday announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of the agency’s operations in Colorado and across the United States. Arrests have increased here and nationally as Trump administration officials have pushed for more detentions as part of a mass-deportation plan. ICE data from the first several months of the year showed that a majority of those immigrants arrested had never been convicted of a crime.
The news release was also a rare public disclosure from ICE about its efforts and the scale of its arrests. The agency previously had refused to say how many immigrants it arrested or deported in high-profile raids elsewhere in Colorado this year.
The statement identifies the specific crimes associated with 55 arrestees who are not identified but, ICE said, have been charged, are suspected in or have been convicted of those offenses. One person was wanted on suspicion of murder, and another for human trafficking, though the release does not say if those suspects have been charged.
Drug offenses, assault, theft and driving under the influence represented most of the 55 arrests linked to specific crimes, whether charged or convicted.
Nine of the 243 people arrested had alleged ties to gangs or drug cartels, the release says.
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