ICE federal immigration agents arrested more than 1,300 people during a two-week enforcement operation targeting illegal immigrants in Virginia and Maryland, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Aug. 24.
Operation Safe Community, the Washington D.C. component, ran from Aug. 1 to Aug. 14 and resulted in 1,328 arrests. Of those, nearly 400 were charged with or convicted of crimes in the United States. The DHS said the operation targeted individuals with criminal records including convictions for sexual battery, kidnapping, driving while intoxicated, hit-and-run, identity theft, robbery, murder, attempted murder and rape. ICE said the detainees include alleged members of transnational gangs including MS-13, the 18th Street Gang and Tren de Aragua.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement that sanctuary policies in Virginia and Maryland counties prioritize the needs of illegal immigrants over public safety, and that the Trump administration would always put American citizens first.
What sanctuary policies do
The DHS statement emphasized that the arrests were made despite sanctuary policies in many counties across both states. Sanctuary policies limit or prohibit local law enforcement from sharing information about individuals in their custody with federal immigration authorities and from holding people at federal request beyond their release date. The federal government has increasingly targeted jurisdictions with such policies, arguing they impede immigration enforcement.
Proponents of these policies argue that they encourage immigrant communities to cooperate with local police on criminal matters without fear of deportation, which they say improves overall public safety.
The ICE acting assistant director for enforcement and removal operations said the operation was designed to improve public safety in Virginia and Maryland by removing illegal immigrants with criminal records.
The scope of Operation Safe Community
The 1,328 arrests over 14 days represents a significant concentration of ICE enforcement activity in the region. The national average for daily arrests during surges has increased substantially under the current administration, and regional operations of this scale have been a recurring feature of the enforcement push since early 2025.
The criminal history component of the operation represents the 400 individuals with U.S. charges or convictions, meaning the remaining approximately 900 were arrested for immigration status without a documented U.S. criminal record. The DHS statement did not specify what portion of those had criminal records in their countries of origin.
The broader context
Operation Safe Community is one of a series of coordinated regional ICE enforcement operations the administration has conducted in major metropolitan areas since the start of the year. Similar ICE operations have been announced in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and other cities with significant immigrant populations and municipal governments that maintain sanctuary policies.
The pattern of announcing these operations through DHS press releases with explicit criticism of local sanctuary jurisdictions reflects both an enforcement strategy and a political framing that contrasts federal priorities with local policies.
Virginia and Maryland collectively contain several of the wealthiest suburban counties adjacent to the nation’s capital, and ICE’s operation there reflects the federal government’s focus on jurisdictions with sanctuary policies near Washington, with significant immigrant communities and county governments that have enacted various forms of these policies.
