As President Donald Trump pushes forward on his pledge to carry out mass deportations, U.S. immigration agents are detaining and deporting criminal defendants before their cases can move through the courts, frustrating local law enforcement officials and stirring fear among some crime victims.

Snatching up defendants in the middle of their cases denies justice to communities and especially the victims, prosecutors say. They worry that defendants who are deported before their criminal cases are resolved could return to the United States and commit more crimes.

“There is no level of accountability when someone is deported,” said Ryan Brackley, the assistant district attorney in Arapahoe County, Colorado, which includes the city of Aurora. “We want our victims to get the justice they deserve. When we have crimes of violence and there are victims of record we want to be able to hold their offenders accountable.”

Brackley pointed to a recent case that his office had sought to prosecute.

An anonymous tip and a short video clip sent to the police in Aurora showed a man on his knees, with blood on his hands and one of his ears — the result, investigators later concluded, of being pistol-whipped.

After several weeks, the police arrested a suspect in the beating: Yerbis Manuel Garcia-Quintero, a man from Venezuela who they say sold gold and lent money to other immigrants, and used violence to collect debts. He was charged with several felonies, including extortion and assault, that could have sent him to prison for years if convicted.

Garcia-Quintero posted bail and was released while his case moved toward a trial. But then he failed to show up in court for his preliminary hearing in early April. Prosecutors presumed that he had fled and was now a fugitive.

But it turned out Garcia-Quintero couldn’t have been in court. Immigration agents had already deported him, leaving him unlikely to ever face the charges

For Carlos Perez, the bloodied man in the video, the news that Garcia-Quintero had been deported rather than forced to face charges in Colorado left him shaken. He said he had moved homes on the advice of the police, who worried that Garcia-Quintero would seek retribution while out on bail.

Now he fears for both the safety of his relatives in Venezuela and his wife and 1-year-old daughter, who he worries could be harmed by an associate of Garcia-Quintero’s in Colorado.

“It would be better if he were in prison because my family is in Venezuela, and that’s a lawless country,” Perez, 41, said.

He said he had enlisted his brother to try to find out if Garcia-Quintero was in custody in Venezuela, or was free and walking the streets. “He hasn’t paid for the crime he committed,” Perez said. “I worry every single day.”

Across the country, defendants out on bail have dropped off the radar, failing to appear in court. Only later do prosecutors learn that the immigrants have been picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and won’t be back for trial.

Detaining and deporting defendants happened rarely under other presidents. But Trump made it common during his first term in office, according to legal experts. A study in New York tallied 159 courthouse arrests there in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, compared with 11 in 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year in office.

When President Joe Biden came into office, he issued a memo limiting courthouse immigration arrests to matters related to national security or if the person was a threat to public safety. Now, under Trump, such arrests are once again becoming routine.

Thomas Homan, Trump’s border czar, said that ICE officials would be willing to work with local prosecutors who wanted to take back into custody an individual for a criminal case. Local prosecutors, he said in an interview, can file a request with the regional ICE office seeking to take into custody a defendant who is in immigration detention.

However, he said, ICE will look to pick people up who may be out on bond awaiting trial, as in the case of Garcia-Quintero.

“If somebody wants to put him on bond, and he’s a significant public safety threat, we’re picking him up,” Homan said. “If they want to take him back into custody, they can, but we’re not going to allow him to walk the street.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency was “going to make thoughtful decisions in each case and do whatever is most likely to keep the American people safe.”

She said that DHS supported holding defendants accountable in U.S. criminal courts. But if people are out on bail — a standard mechanism for ensuring those charged with crimes make their court appearances — “we will choose deportation,” she said. “We think victims would rather their assailants not roam America’s streets.”

Agents have shown up unannounced at courthouses to take immigrants into custody, creating scenes of panic, fear and sometimes violence. At a courthouse in New Hampshire, agents tackled a man they were trying to detain, knocking over a bystander in the process. In a recent case in Charlottesville, Virginia, agents showed up at a courthouse to arrest two people and were confronted by angry onlookers. And in Boston, a man was arrested in the middle of trial, provoking outrage from the district attorney.

Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes Boston, denounced ICE’s actions, saying the agency was making the community less safe and making it more difficult to reduce crime.

“My office’s responsibility is to hold offenders accountable, secure justice for victims, witnesses and the greater community.” He continued:

“We cannot and will not tolerate ICE hindering our ability to pursue those vital public safety goals.”

As courthouses reemerge as a flashpoint, some local officials are ending up in the middle of the fight. A Wisconsin judge was recently arrested by the FBI, which said that she tried to help a man in her courtroom who lacked permanent legal status evade federal agents. And Homan, the border czar, recently threatened more arrests of local officials if they got in the way of the federal government’s immigration crackdown.