To understand these arrests and their effects, reporters set out to track down as many regional cases as possible in a system that is notoriously opaque. There are no public records akin to police blotters in criminal cases. The names of ICE arrestees, and the circumstances of their arrests, are not released. Court records, too, are confidential, purportedly to protect immigrants’ privacy, though the policy protects the immigration system from scrutiny, too.

Reporters ended up examining more than 175 immigration arrests, which occurred during three large, multiday enforcement operations last winter, spring, and fall as well as during routine, daily apprehensions.

Together, these cases paint the picture of an ICE region emboldened by a new commander-in-chief to disregard previous norms that distinguished among undocumented immigrants based on their family ties, work records, and conduct in this country. They reflect an organization that valued high arrest numbers and sometimes skirted the law, with little accountability in a system that rarely scrutinizes arrests.

Reporters found that ICE officers under the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia regional office:

Routinely swept up immigrants they encountered by chance when they set out to arrest somebody else, with what they called “collateral” arrests becoming the mainstay of their crackdown.

Informally expanded their definition of “criminal alien” to include immigrants who got traffic tickets or committed minor infractions like loitering.

Revived cases that they previously disregarded, using addresses in their database to pick up immigrants they had once deemed harmless, sometimes sending carloads of armed officers to arrest them.

Took advantage of state and local officials’ willingness to conduct their own informal immigration investigations, call ICE and detain immigrants for hours until federal agents arrived — despite the questionable legality of these practices.

Occasionally stepped over the legal line themselves, according to interviews, sworn affidavits, and court filings, by trespassing, conducting warrantless searches, engaging in racial profiling, fabricating evidence, and even soliciting a bribe.

In a statement, agency officials said: "ICE and its employees have been given the honor of a special public trust. In keeping with this trust, ICE’s enforcement activities are conducted with integrity and professionalism." They added: "ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy."

All told, the crackdown bombarded a system already overwhelmed. There were 11,643 cases pending in Pennsylvania’s immigration courts on March 1 — a 62 percent increase over the end of fiscal 2016.

There are 62% more cases now pending in Pennsylvania’s immigration courts than at the end of fiscal 2016

Immigration judges staggered under their growing caseloads. After his retirement in December, Walter A. Durling, a veteran immigration judge at York who took a relatively hard line on the bench, questioned the wisdom — and cost-effectiveness — of an approach that no longer puts “more serious aliens” first.

“Why take into custody an individual who has been here for 15 to 20 years, has U.S. children, and one arrest for harassment, public intoxication or some such piddling infraction?’’ he asked. “Or aliens with no arrest record but who were arrested by ICE looking for someone else?’’

In 2016, the government would have considered it a waste of limited resources to track down, arrest, detain, and deport a taxpaying family man like Ludvin Franco just because a traffic accident brought him to its attention.

The Springfield Township Police Department in Bucks County, where Franco’s accident occurred, did not report him to ICE, Chief Michael A. McDonald said. Rather, it was ICE that called Springfield, seeking to confirm that citations had been issued to Franco for careless driving and driving without a license.

Deportation officers also took the additional step of interviewing the driver and passenger of the other car.

That interview provided a dollop of innuendo to the deportation officers’ arrest report. As if to bolster their case that Franco warranted removal, the officers wrote that the driver’s wife suffered a stroke approximately two weeks after the accident.

“It was unknown if this traffic accident caused his wife’s stroke,’’ the report said.

But Lisa Knedler, the driver’s wife, told reporters that her doctor did not think her seizure, as she called it, was in any way related to the crash, in which she was a passenger.

She added that she was nonetheless glad Franco had been deported.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t come back,’’ she said.

Came out swinging

Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order called “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,’’ which greatly expanded the population of undocumented immigrants who could be deported.

While immigrants with serious criminal convictions would still “come first,’’ any unauthorized immigrant would become fair game, Thomas Homan, acting director of ICE, told Congress: “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country,’’ he said, “you should look over your shoulder.’’

ANDREW HARNIK / AP Photo Thomas Homan, right, acting director of ICE, said any unauthorized immigrant – not just those with serious convictions – faces arrest and deportation.

Still, in their first big enforcement operations under the new rules, ICE offices in Los Angeles and New York effectively operated under the old rules. L.A. arrested 161 immigrants over five days, 94 percent of whom had criminal convictions, and New York arrested 41 over three days, 93 percent with convictions.

Philadelphia’s ICE office, in contrast, came out of the gates swinging. In an “ops plan” submitted to Washington, it proposed a 12-day arrest blitz named Operation Cross Check that would take aim at 255 targets, 70 percent of them "criminal aliens," according to agency e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

By the 12th day, agents had located only 92 of their intended targets but made up almost all the difference by arresting other immigrants they encountered along the way. In the end, they rounded up 248 people; only 35 percent had a conviction record.

And a pattern was established. By year’s end, Philadelphia ICE would arrest three times as many “noncriminal immigration violators,’’ in the agency’s term, as either Los Angeles or New York.

In a statement, ICE noted that “immigration violators without criminal convictions include aliens who have been charged but not convicted with crimes, immigration fugitives, and repeat border crossers.’’

Each ICE field office has its own culture, and sometimes its own policies and procedures. Each office, too, has a different regional context, some working in urban centers under the watchful eye of established immigrant communities, others in more rural or suburban areas newly grappling with the immigration issue.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE operations targeting illegal immigrants yielded 248 arrests in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware in March 2017.

Philadelphia ICE’s region runs the gamut. It faces resistance in Pittsburgh and especially in Philadelphia, where most of the region’s undocumented immigrants live. But it has found allies in its rural and Rust Belt zones, where anti-immigrant sentiment runs hotter and where some local economies benefit from federal immigration detention contracts. (ICE paid York County $19.65 million in fiscal 2017 to house immigrant detainees in its prison.)

Getting direct insight into the Philadelphia ICE office itself has been difficult. The agency denied reporters’ requests to interview those who have run the office during the Trump administration. The National ICE Council, which represents 7,600 agency employees, declined to talk. Individual deportation officers, reached on their personal phones, declined too.

As best as could be determined, behind the office’s aggressive immigration enforcement lies some synergy of national, state, local, and ICE office politics. But the critical context is clearly an antagonistic relationship between ICE and the city of Philadelphia that predates the Trump administration.

Like other major cities, Philadelphia does not let ICE agents into its jails and declines to provide ICE advance notice of a suspect’s or inmate’s release without a judicial warrant.

“Some jurisdictions shut the door in our face: San Francisco was one, Philly was another,’’ said Sarah Saldaña, ICE’s national director for Obama’s two final years.

This posture made it harder for Philadelphia’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) to produce high arrest numbers when the emphasis was on criminals. And high arrest numbers are the yardstick of ICE’s success, given that Congress judges the agency by how many detention beds it fills, Saldaña said.

ANDREW HARNIK / AP Sarah Saldana, a former director of ICE, says high arrest numbers are crucial to agency’s success with Congress.

Catherine Schack, who retired last year as an ICE lawyer in Philadelphia, said she instantly perceived a tougher mind-set there when she transferred from the Los Angeles office during the Obama era.

“The first thing I noticed was, ‘Holy mackerel, this town is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love? Good grief,’ '' she said. “What I always saw in Philly was distinctly, ‘We need to bump up numbers.’ But after Trump took over, it was like somebody gave them an injection of testosterone. It was ERO on steroids.’’

In the last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has singled out Philadelphia for special denunciation as a so-called sanctuary city, and Philadelphia has sued Sessions over his attempt to withhold federal grant money in retribution.

“Holy mackerel, this town is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love? Good grief.” – Catherine Schack, retired ICE lawyer

In response to questions about the Philadelphia ICE office’s high volume of noncriminal arrests, the agency portrayed the city itself as partly responsible.

“When cities do not honor ICE detainers, ICE officers are required to arrest aliens at large and may be more likely to encounter other removable aliens,’’ said Jennifer D. Elzea, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Still, noncriminal arrests did not soar equivalently in other sanctuary cities last year. A third of the arrests in the San Francisco ICE region, for instance, were immigrants without criminal convictions, compared with 64 percent for Philadelphia.

Also, only 33 of 248 arrests in Philadelphia ICE’s first big operation last year took place in Philadelphia proper, an analysis of internal records shows. Most of the collateral arrests, it appears, did not in fact result from searches for criminal immigrants whom the City of Philadelphia declined to hand over.

Defenseless

On a cold, dark morning early last year, Guillermo Peralta huddled in the entryway of a small, aluminum-sided apartment house on a modest residential street in York Springs. He was waiting for a ride to his job, packing eggs on a farm.

Peralta is short and stout, with a shy, ready smile for whomever crosses his path.

That morning, it was two federal agents named Joe Vankos and Chad Noel. They were on a mission to capture a 29-year-old convicted cocaine dealer from Mexico.

Instead, they stumbled across and arrested Peralta. Though regional ICE agents had picked up bystanders in the past, they were not supposed to. But in a new era where every undocumented immigrant is a potential target, Peralta was one of the first “collaterals” to be taken into custody. And one of the most defenseless.