The Trump administration doesn’t have much to brag about. So it’s worth paying attention when they do.

On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the agency responsible for deporting unauthorized immigrants from the US) put out a flashy, photo-studded press release trumpeting the number of immigrants it had arrested in President Trump’s first 100 days: nearly 41,000.

“These statistics reflect President Trump’s commitment to enforce our immigration laws fairly and across the board,” the press release quotes ICE’s acting director, Thomas Homan, as saying. “ICE continues to execute our mission professionally and in accordance with the law, and our communities will be much safer for it.”

The pace of immigrant arrests is up sharply from the past two years of the Obama administration. It’s comparable to the immigration regime that existed for the decade before that — when millions of unauthorized immigrants went about their daily lives in the US in constant fear of deportation at any time.

So far, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement record resembles the first term of the Obama administration: the high-water mark for deportation and immigrant fear in modern US history.

Even as the administration is plagued by scandals and leaks, and the Republican legislative agenda is moving in fits and starts, the enthusiasm with which this administration has taken to immigration enforcement is shaping up to be its biggest success. It’s proceeding apace, untouched by the drama that has engulfed the Trump White House and threatens to sink his presidency. And even in the unlikely event that Trump is somehow forced from office, the lasting effects of the last few months are going to take a long time to undo.

ICE isn’t being indiscriminate in whom it arrests — but it’s certainly being less picky

The latest statistics released by ICE appear to confirm the picture of immigration enforcement under Trump that’s emerged from earlier data and from anecdotal reports around the country: ICE isn’t being wholly indiscriminate in going after unauthorized immigrants, but it’s being a lot less picky in going after the “low-hanging fruit.”

According to ICE statistics, 75 percent of the immigrants arrested during Trump’s first 100 days had some criminal conviction — but it’s not clear how many of those were for crimes that might be considered minor, or for crimes that are the result of being an unauthorized immigrant in the US (such as driving without a license in a state that doesn’t permit unauthorized immigrants to get drivers’ licenses). Only about 6 percent were convicted of the most serious crimes, including murder and assault.

It’s not clear why or how ICE picked up the other 10,000 immigrants, who had no criminal record but got arrested by immigration agents anyway. But the anecdotal evidence that’s emerged over the past few months indicates that ICE agents are going after immigrants they have already identified and tracked: either people who already have prior orders of deportation or who have been ordered to check in with ICE at regular intervals. (It’s worth noting that not everyone who gets arrested will be deported — in fact, as of mid-March, deportations were down slightly from 2016.)

These trends don’t appear to be a matter of policy — if you define “policy” as an edict from above, an executive order, even a press release. The point of the Trump administration’s law enforcement policy, on immigration as on criminal justice, is that rank-and-file officers ought to be trusted to know how best to go about their jobs. But what we’ve seen appears to be a pattern: the same decisions getting made over and over again.

Unauthorized immigrants who aren’t as likely to come into contact with ICE agents, and haven’t yet, are probably less likely to get arrested and set for deportation. But it means it’s impossible to call them “safe.” Just because an ICE agent has made one decision so far doesn’t stop him from making the opposite decision next time.

A return to the constant presence of ICE in immigrant communities

The Trump administration is making this look more unprecedented than it really is. It’s comparing its 2017 efforts to 2016. But to immigrant communities, what’s happened so far is so scary because it’s so familiar: It’s just a return to the most threatened they’ve ever felt.

While arrests of immigrants are up from this time in 2015 and 2016, they’re still lagging behind 2013 and 2014 levels, according to the Wall Street Journal. For all the complaints from candidate Trump (and President Trump) that President Barack Obama didn’t enforce immigration law, Trump’s attempts to “step up” immigration enforcement are, so far, a return to the policies of his predecessor’s first six years — when immigrants who had any contact with the criminal justice system or with immigration agents were liable to be arrested and deported, and no unauthorized immigrant was entirely safe.

To a great extent, that’s because this is the policy that ICE field agents wanted to be pursuing all along — many ICE agents were uncomfortable with the idea of just leaving broad swaths of immigrants alone when they were eligible for deportation. The Obama administration issued a set of guidelines in November 2014 that laid out clear priorities for who should and shouldn’t get taken into immigration custody and deported. The result was that arrests dropped, and immigrants felt safer, but agents felt their hands were impermissibly tied.

The Trump administration is explicitly letting the agents set the policy. And the result is that so far, it looks a lot more like 2014 — though there’s some indication that it’s picking up the pace even more. Over the first two months of the Trump administration, according to data obtained by the Washington Post last month, ICE arrested about 100 non-criminal immigrants a day; comparing that with the new data from ICE, it appears the pace has since stepped up to 110.

But the biggest difference in what the Trump administration is bragging about is “at-large arrests”: cases where ICE agents are going into immigrant communities to track people down. Trump administration officials have often described these as a necessary evil; they say it’s safer for agents to take into custody immigrants who are already in prisons or jails, but that if “sanctuary” jurisdictions refuse to help out federal agents, they’ll be forced to go into neighborhoods and courtrooms.

In the press release, though, the fact that “at-large arrests” are up 52 percent is an apparent point of pride.

Those are the arrests that have the biggest chilling effects rippling through immigrant communities. They’re the ones that make it impossible to know whether ICE is targeting specific individuals or sweeping indiscriminately through neighborhoods — and engender false rumors about roadside checkpoints and arrests in schools. They’re the arrests that do the most to remind millions of unauthorized immigrants that they could be next.

The government can’t control chilling effects. And a change in policy isn’t enough to undo the damage they cause. This was another lesson of the Obama administration: that it takes very little time to terrify a community, and a long time and a lot of proactive work to coax them to let go of that fear.

Donald Trump might not serve out a full four-year term; the possibility that he’ll be removed from office (or simply resign) is still very remote, but this administration is nothing if not unpredictable. But even if he does leave office — and even if President Mike Pence decides to make an effort to rein in immigration enforcement again (which is hardly likely) — the marks the Trump administration has already left on immigrant communities will take years to fade. Even if “at-large” arrests stop, it will take people a while to notice, and even longer to feel confident that they won’t start up again.

This is what the administration is bragging about.