A prosecutor said the presence of immigration agents in state and local courthouses, which advocates say has increased under the Trump Administration, makes it harder to prosecute crime.
"My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen," Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state's King County, which includes Seattle, said. "The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust."
A spokeswoman for ICE said her agency "remains sensitive" to victims and witnesses and helps them obtain visas or stays of deportation in some cases. But she said anyone in the US illegally could be deported.
ICE "focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security," spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said in a statement. "However, as [Homeland Security] Secretary [John] Kelly has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement."
Nearly three-quarters of the immigrants arrested from January 20 to March 13 had criminal convictions, an increase of 15 per cent over the same period last year.
But the biggest spike is the arrest of immigrants with no criminal records, with immigration field offices in New York, Boston and other places doubling or tripling their numbers from last year.
ICE's Atlanta office arrested the most immigrants who had never committed any crimes, with nearly 700 arrests, up from 137 the prior year. Philadelphia had the biggest percentage increase, with 356 noncriminal arrests, more than six times as many as the year before.
The ICE field offices with the largest total number of arrests - more than 2000 each - were in Dallas, which covers North Texas and Oklahoma; Atlanta, which includes Georgia and the Carolinas; and Houston, which spans Southeast Texas.
Immigration detainers - voluntary requests from ICE to law enforcement agencies to hold those arrested beyond their normal release so that agents can take them into custody and deport them - also rose, to 22,161. That was a 75 per cent jump from the year before. But many were issued in areas that do not necessarily comply with ICE requests.
Overall, deportations are down by 1.2 per cent, to 54,741 in January, February and March, compared with the same period last year. Elzea said it can take time to remove someone from the US, but the number of noncriminals deported is higher this year, while the number of criminals who were deported fell. Despite his pledge to send criminals packing, Trump has struggled to get countries such as China to take their citizens back.
Some say criticism of Trump's policies seems politically charged, noting that President Barack Obama deported thousands of immigrants without criminal records. And arrests this year are lower than Obama's first weeks in 2014, when agents arrested 29,238 immigrants, including 7483 noncriminal ones.
The Mayor of Miami-Dade County said in a recent interview that he has fielded more protests over the city's immigration policies this year than under Obama.
"It's all got to do with the president," said Mayor Carlos Gimenez, a Republican who said he voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. "Most of it has to do with politics. It's sad."
But Anabel Barron, an immigrant activist in Ohio, said she is facing deportation even though she is a domestic-violence victim who applied for a visa. She said ICE officials have affixed an electronic-tracking device to her ankle.
"I'm scared to go back to Mexico," she said. "I'm losing hope."
Advocates for immigrants say they also criticised Obama as the "deporter in chief" and waged a national campaign to create sanctuary cities to shield immigrants from deportation.
But they said Obama sought to avoid deporting longtime immigrants with roots in their communities and US-born children. He also lobbied Congress to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and granted work permits to more than 700,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
And in a November 2014 memo, Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson restricted immigration arrests mainly to criminals and those who recently crossed the US border, and immigration arrests plunged.
