Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement A new release of federal data suggests the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants is hitting Northwest Arkansas especially hard, according to the Associated Press. An AP story published Thursday says more than 450 people were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Benton County jail in the first nine months of the second Trump administration. That’s almost a dozen arrests per week — a very high number for a county with about 310,000 people. The Benton County Sheriff’s Office is one of more than a thousand local law enforcement agencies around the country that partner with ICE under its 287(g) program, which authorizes officers to perform certain immigration enforcement duties. But Benton County appears to have been especially aggressive in implementing 287(g) under the Trump administration. “The county’s program accounted for more than 4% of roughly 7,000 arrests nationwide that were attributed to similar programs during the first 9 1/2 months of this year,” the AP report says. The numbers are based on information recently released by the Deportation Data Project, an independent effort by a group of attorneys and academics to obtain and publish federal data on immigration enforcement. A law passed this spring by Republicans in the state Legislature requires all county sheriffs in the state to apply for 287(g) cooperation with ICE. But as we reported in August, not all 287(g) agreements are equal; there are different tiers of participation. Benton County chose to pursue a closer partnership with ICE than required under the new state law, signing up for what’s called the “jail enforcement model.” That means Benton County sheriff deputies can access federal databases to look into the immigration status of jail inmates and hold people in custody for longer, giving ICE more time to investigate. They can also serve warrants on behalf of ICE on people held in jail. Detainees taken into custody by ICE are then typically transferred to the jail in Fayetteville in neighboring Washington County before being sent to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana, the AP reports. Benton and Washington counties are the two fastest-growing counties in the state, and immigrants have been a large part of that growth. A 2016 report found that Benton County’s foreign-born population increased by 39% between 2009 and 2014. Mireya Reith, the director of the Fayetteville-based immigrant advocacy group Arkansas United, said the Benton County numbers were surprising. Though there have been several notable immigration enforcement incidents in Arkansas this year, the state hasn’t seen the high-profile, large-scale deployments or raids the Trump administration has ordered in some other parts of the country (such as New Orleans currently). Reith said her team believes people in the Northwest Arkansas immigrant community may not be talking about detentions of family members because of stigma and fear. Arkansas United investigators also “think it is the rural communities outside the I-49 corridor where a lot of this coordination [between ICE and local law enforcement] is quietly going down,” she said. Interstate 49 is the north-south artery that links the four major cities of Northwest Arkansas — Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville. According to The New York Times, the federal data released this week shows most immigrants arrested in the recent Trump administration deployments to large cities don’t have criminal records. Only a tiny fraction had violent convictions. “Less than 30 percent of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime, an analysis of the data shows, and a very small share had been convicted of a violent crime,” the Times reported. “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.” Being present in the U.S. without legal status is a civil violation, not a criminal offense, though some immigration violations — such as reentering the U.S. after deportation — do constitute crimes under federal law. Benjamin Hardy is managing editor at the Arkansas Times. His email is benjaminhardy@arktimes.com More by Benjamin Hardy