Federal officials carrying out a crackdown on illegal immigration in Metro Detroit have caused the number of criminal cases filed in federal court to rise sharply, records show.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Michigan have filed immigration-related criminal charges against at least 46 people since Jan. 1. In 2024, during President Joseph Biden’s last full year in office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Michigan prosecuted 70 people for immigration-related crimes, according to court records and a database created by The Detroit News.

Court documents, interviews and U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics provide an early look at the impact of President Donald Trump’s attempt to suppress illegal or undocumented immigration and reveal undercover approaches agents are taking to arrest people.

The data shows how the crackdown in Metro Detroit has caught people from eight countries, mostly citizens of Mexico and habitual offenders who have illegally entered the U.S. as many as nine times while building rap sheets for assault, an arrest for drug conspiracy and, in the case of a Venezuelan man living in Detroit, alleged ties to the gang Tren de Aragua, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

The group charged in federal court this year includes Haidar Abo Ayedh Almuntaser, a Yemeni accused of illegally crossing the Mexican border. He arrived in California, prosecutors said, as part of a conspiracy that involved wiring thousands of dollars to human smugglers.

“The money wired as part of this conspiracy allowed Almuntaser to astonishingly and successfully cross eight international borders without a passport,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Straus wrote while urging a magistrate judge to keep Almuntaser in jail.

The majority of criminal cases in federal court involve immigrants who have previously been removed from the United States.

“These cases represent a fraction of the criminal aliens we and our federal partners arrest every day across the Detroit Sector that’s making this country safer than it was just a few short months ago,” Chief Patrol Agent John Morris of the Detroit Border Patrol sector said in a statement.

Separately, immigrants can face civil charges in federal immigration courts if the government believes they are living in the United States illegally. Hearings are held to determine if an immigrant will be allowed to stay in the U.S. or deported.

There have been 715 new deportation cases in immigration court in January in Michigan, down from 768 a month earlier. There’s a backlog of more than 31,000 cases, according to the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse nonprofit.

Border trends

Sentencings for federal immigration crimes committed in the Eastern District of Michigan, which stretches from mid-Michigan to Canada and from the Ohio border to the Mackinac Bridge, meanwhile, have fluctuated from 2015-23, reaching a high of 193 people sentenced in 2018 during Trump’s first term. The total dipped to 24 people sentenced in 2022 during Biden’s tenure, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Meanwhile, arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico, where the Pentagon has deployed about 3,600 active-duty soldiers, fell 39% in January compared with a month earlier amid increased enforcement efforts. The Border Patrol made 21,593 arrests during the month, down from 47,316 in December and the lowest mark since May 2020 near the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

There has been a similar decline along the northern border with Canada. In Michigan, federal agents encountered 626 people in January, down from 1,135 a month earlier, a nearly 45% decline.

The increased immigration enforcement is backed by broad support among the public. Most Americans said they approve of increasing the number of deportations, according to a Pew Research Center Jan. 27-Feb. 2 survey. The poll found 59% of 5,086 U.S. adults said they approved of Trump increasing immigration enforcement actions.

“The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan has a long-standing commitment to enforcing the immigration laws of the United States and that commitment is unwavering,” Acting U.S. Attorney Julie Beck said in a statement to The News. “We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to investigate and prosecute those individuals who are in our district unlawfully.”

But the survey also showed 47% or less than half supported cutting federal money to cities and states that do not help with deportation efforts.

Border arrests fell sharply well before Trump took office from an all-time high of 250,000 in December 2023. Mexican authorities increased enforcement within their own borders, and Biden introduced severe asylum restrictions in June.

Arrests sank further after Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20 and issued a slew of orders on immigration, including one to suspend asylum on grounds that the United States is under “invasion” at the southern border

Detroit area arrests

The local arrests are spread across eastern Michigan, from Monroe to Mount Pleasant and points in between. That includes Detroit, where a Mexican man kicked out of the U.S. four times made a wrong turn onto the Ambassador Bridge, a Home Depot in Warren and along southbound I-75 in Taylor.

That is where police stopped Mexican citizen Cristian De Jesus Perez Sargento on Jan. 14 after they said he drove recklessly along the highway. Perez Sargento told investigators he paid a smuggler $7,000 to sneak him into the country three years ago and has been living in Memphis, Tennessee.

Investigators searched his phone. They found pictures of Perez Sargento holding what appeared to be an AR-15-type rifle, and another photo of someone with a handgun in their lap, according to the government. Perez Sargento said he posed with the rifle “because it looked cool” and admitted the handgun in the picture was a gift from a friend, Border Patrol Agent Brett Laug wrote in an affidavit.

“He told the agents that he could not remember if the gun was in the glove compartment of his car, where he normally keeps it, or at his home,” Laug wrote.

Agents searched the glove compartment and found a black Taurus 9mm handgun, loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition, the agent wrote.

His lawyer, Daniel Dena, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The crackdown locally includes one immigrant arrested on Jan. 20, about three hours after Trump was sworn into office.

At 3:30 p.m., investigators with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement team went looking for 46-year-old Mexican citizen Jesus Antonio Ocampo-Guerrero, who was believed to be in the U.S. illegally.

They found him on South Telegraph Road in Monroe. Investigators stopped his white GMC Acadia two blocks west of Hi-Lite Fresh Market and asked for his identification.

Ocampo-Guerrero gave them a phony name: “Miguel Acosta,” ICE Deportation Officer Hector Rivera wrote in an affidavit filed in federal court.

This wasn’t Ocampo-Guerrero’s first contact with immigration officials. Ocampo-Guerrero has been deported four times since 1999 and has been convicted of assaulting a relative in Texas, a

drug crime and theft.

After giving investigators a phony name in January in Monroe, Ocampo-Guerrero eventually told investigators his real name, prosecutors alleged. He was charged with illegally re-entering the U.S. three days later, and the criminal case is pending in federal court in Detroit.

His lawyer, Stacey Studnicki, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Money laundering case detailed

Pablo Perez-Magdaleno, meanwhile, was arrested in Lincoln Park on Feb. 18 after Border Patrol agents posed as buyers interested in his used Ford F-250 Super Duty truck.

Agents had tracked him to an address in Lincoln Park after receiving a tip that he had illegally returned to the U.S. from Mexico.

Investigators started surveilling the home on Russell Avenue and spotted a man driving the Ford truck with “for sale” signs in the windshield, court records show.

Agents called the phone number listed on the sign and arranged a time to inspect the truck at a nearby Kroger parking lot. They arrested Perez-Magdaleno nearby, and he is charged with illegally returning to the U.S., a crime that could send him to federal prison for two years.

Lawyers in two states, meanwhile, fought last month over the fate of Almuntaser, the immigrant from Yemen. Almuntaser, 30, was arrested in Dearborn on Feb. 14 as a federal magistrate judge in Alabama unsealed a criminal case charging him with international money laundering conspiracy.

Court records alleged he snuck into the U.S. four years ago with the help of two men who wired almost $16,000 from Alabama to human smugglers.

“He left Yemen because the Houthis were doing, basically, ethnic cleansing of Shiites,” his lawyer, Sanford Schulman, said during a detention hearing. “It’s a terrible situation.”

After sneaking into the country and entering through California, Almuntaser claimed asylum.

“Almuntaser’s choice to cross the border in the desert rather than at an entry point strongly suggests that his actual desire was to get into the United States undetected, not to legitimately seek refuge here as an asylee,” Straus, the federal prosecutor, argued while trying to keep Almuntaser behind bars.

Since arriving in the U.S., Almuntaser lived in several states before settling in Dearborn with his wife. He has secured jobs at Amazon and a local restaurant, paid a mortgage, become a father and is helping raise a stepson, his lawyer said.

His wife, a U.S. citizen, is pregnant.

“This is not (a case about) sending money to a designated terrorist organization. This is not him being the head of a drug organization where there’s money laundering,” Schulman said. “This is as simple a case as you can get in terms of living the dream.”

Despite prosecutors requesting detention, U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge David Grand last month ordered Almuntaser be released on home detention with a GPS tether.

Prosecutors in Alabama immediately tried to undo the order, asking a federal judge to keep Almuntaser behind bars, calling him “an extreme flight risk.”

A federal judge in Alabama revoked the magistrate judge’s order. Almuntaser will stay behind bars for now.

The Associated Press contributed to this report