Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed all 4,000 Operation Metro Surge arrests were dangerous criminals

On February 4, 2026, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a public statement declaring that "more than 4,000 dangerous criminal illegal aliens" had been arrested in Minnesota since the launch of Operation Metro Surge, characterizing the operation as a success in removing threats from communities. The statement accompanied Border Czar Tom Homan's announcement that he was drawing down surge forces in Minneapolis, citing "unprecedented cooperation" from local officials. The White House press release described the 4,000 arrestees as including "violent killers, rapists, gang members, and other public safety threats."

ICE's own arrest data, obtained by the Deportation Data Project through a Freedom of Information Act request and analyzed by The Intercept, directly contradicted the characterization. Of 4,030 ICE arrests made in Minnesota from December 2025 through mid-March 2026, 2,532 — 63 percent — involved individuals with no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. The data showed that the proportion of arrests of non-criminal individuals increased during the surge itself: before December 2025, 44 percent of ICE arrests in Minnesota involved people without criminal records; during the surge period through February 12, that figure rose to 64 percent. A total of 97 percent of surge-period arrests were non-custodial street arrests. ICE possessed this data at the time of Leavitt's February 4 statement.

The false characterization served a specific function: by publicly framing thousands of non-criminal individuals as dangerous criminals, the administration sought to legitimize the sweep and obscure the extent to which the operation targeted people with no criminal history. This archive records Leavitt's February 4 statement as state-sponsored disinformation about a federal enforcement operation's targets — not the March 30 FOIA disclosure, which is a development on this originating event.