A Midwest immigration office is touting a big increase in arrests of what it calls ‘criminal and fugitive aliens.’ Immigrant advocates say those labels mischaracterize workers who posed no threat.

In the fiscal year that ran through September, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement district that includes Illinois arrested more than a thousand immigrants who’d been ordered deported. That’s about twice as many as the previous year. An immigration spokeswoman says 166—about 15 percent—had criminal records.

But Claudia Valenzuela of the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center says few of those arrested posed any threat.

VALENZUELA: The idea is these individuals have skipped out, are hiding, because they’ve been ordered deported from the United States. But the reality is that many of these individuals just simply never received notice of their hearing date. 

And many, Valenzuela says, didn’t know a judge had ordered their removal.

Officials attribute the jump in arrests mostly to increased enforcement staffing.

I’m Chip Mitchell, Chicago Public Radio.