By CHRIS POWELL
Dozens of immigration arrests in the Danbury area last week sent Connecticut’s Democratic leaders into fits of hysteria and hypocrisy.
Governor Lamont complained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “are not trying to coordinate with us. They’re just picking people up.”
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The governor seemed to have forgotten that with his support the state enacted a law forbidding its police officers from cooperating with ordinary immigration enforcement.
The governor issued a statement detailing the rights of illegal immigrants and how they should act if arrested. He has yet to issue a statement saying they should obey immigration law, nor a statement informing them that the federal government will pay them $3,000 and arrange their transportation if they deport themselves. Deportation doesn’t have to be cruel and abrupt for those who want to obey the law.
State and municipal officials and opponents of immigration law enforcement complained that illegal immigrants were scared by the arrests. But why shouldn’t people be scared of breaking the law?
Danbury Mayor Roberto L. Alves, who is also Democratic state chairman, said he and other Democrats were “demanding accountability” from ICE and wanted to know what it was doing in the Danbury area. But they knew very well what was going on. ICE was “demanding accountability” from people in the country illegally.
The governor and other Democrats also complained that ICE was not limiting immigration enforcement to “violent criminals.” This complaint approached the heart of the matter.
For while the governor and other Democrats will never put it plainly, their position is that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be forgiven their lawbreaking and left alone unless they are caught committing another crime. State government’s position to that effect is well known — thanks to state government’s granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and its law forbidding state and municipal police from assisting ordinary immigration enforcement. So Connecticut is understood to be a “sanctuary state.”
That is the origin of the cruelty being complained about. For Connecticut invites people to take their chances breaking immigration law rather than to try to enter the country through the normal legal procedures. Connecticut invites them to gamble that eventually the federal government will lose its will to defend the country and instead will grant a mass amnesty to illegal immigrants — that it will open the borders retroactively.
ICE has serious defects. Among them, its officers are not identified by name and badge number and the agency fails to provide prompt public identification of those it has arrested.
But those defects are not why the governor, Mayor Alves, and other leading Democrats are so upset with the agency. They are upset most because they don’t want any ordinary illegal immigrants deported, as they make clear frequently when they say they welcome all immigrants, always failing to distinguish between the legal and illegal, and as they made clear in July when they objected to the arrest in West Hartford of an illegal immigrant who had violated a final order of removal for many years of repeated lawbreaking.
Ordinary immigration law enforcement like last week’s in the Danbury area will impair the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to rig federal and state legislative districting in the party’s favor. The problem is not, as President Trump hallucinates, that illegal immigrants are likely to try voting in great numbers soon. The problem is that most illegal immigrants are drawn to the “sanctuary” jurisdictions Democrats have established for them and will be counted in the federal censuses on which congressional and state legislative districting is based, thereby increasing the number of solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts.
There is also cruelty here to legal Connecticut residents — great financial costs, especially in housing, already in short supply and high in price, and in the education of thousands of children who don’t speak English. The Democrats never frankly appropriated for these costs, for that would have required being honest about them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
Assume that the person apprehended by ICE has been accused of a crime. What have the outcomes been so far? How many detainees have fallen into each category?
I have done my best to reconstruct the charts and comments for what ChatGPT 5 says:
There is an important limitation in the Connecticut statistics that I did not appreciate at first.
The best published Connecticut count I can establish is 319 people apprehended by ICE in Connecticut during 2025 through October who had pending criminal charges but no criminal conviction. That is not a small residual category: it was the largest criminal-history category among Connecticut ICE arrests.
What I would like to give you is this table:Subsequent outcome for those 319
NumberNever booked into ICE detention / quickly released Not published for CT
Detained, then released into the U.S. Not published for CT
Detained, then deported/voluntarily departed Not published for CT
Still in ICE detention Not published for CT
Transferred/other disposition Not published for CT
Total initially apprehended with pending charges319
The frustrating thing is that the underlying data now contain exactly the information needed to fill those cells. The Deportation Data Project has created an individual-level dataset joining each ICE arrest to the detention stay that followed it. It records whether the arrest led to detention, whether the detention ended, the release reason, and removal/departure information. Its newest release goes through August 6, 2026.
The published Connecticut analyses, however, have so far cross-tabulated criminal status and arrest location, but not criminal status against eventual disposition. So, for example, we know that 319 Connecticut arrestees through October 2025 were merely accused rather than convicted, but we cannot legitimately take Connecticut’s overall deportation figure and say how many of those deportations were members of the 319.What the national data tell us
There is nevertheless a useful indication of what probably happens to this group. In the national arrest-to-detention dataset for the second Trump administration through February 2026, ICE recorded:
The national analysis therefore suggests that being merely accused rather than convicted has made surprisingly little difference to the initial detention decision. The corresponding detention rate for people whom ICE classified as convicted criminals was 94.2%.
That same national dataset gives us a useful picture of what ultimately happened to all ICE arrestees under the second Trump administration—not specifically the pending-charge subset:
Outcome Number % of arrests
Removed/deported or voluntary departure 261,302 67.0%
Still in ICE custody 49,818 12.8%
Released without entering detention 38,999 10.0%
Released into U.S. after detention 26,913 6.9%
Transfer/other disposition 12,793 3.3%
Those percentages cover 389,825 arrests and should not simply be multiplied by Connecticut’s 319. Connecticut could differ substantially, and the age of a case matters: more recent arrests naturally contain more people still detained.
There is another complication particularly relevant to this question. The Connecticut criminal accusation can disappear while the ICE detention continues. In one documented Connecticut case, Nathaniel Sterling was apprehended by ICE on December 19, 2025 while he had pending misdemeanor motor-vehicle charges. Connecticut prosecutors entered a nolle prosequi on all those charges about two hours later, yet he remained in ICE detention in Rhode Island months later. Thus the label “pending criminal charges” describes the person’s status at the time ICE apprehended him, not necessarily his subsequent criminal status.
That strikes ChatGPT as the genuinely interesting statistic here. The politically common categories—“criminal,” “charged with a crime,” and “no criminal record”—make it very difficult to see what became of the underlying accusation. What we really want for Connecticut is:
pending charge at ICE arrest → convicted / charges dismissed or nolled / case still pending, crossed with deported / detained / released.
The ICE data can supply the second half, while Connecticut Judicial Branch records could potentially supply the first. That would tell us something much more meaningful than simply saying that 319 people were “charged with crimes.”
One final date caution: the newest individual ICE dataset stops on August 6, 2026, so it does not include the large Danbury/Connecticut operations reported in late August 2026.
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