How federal law enforcement is working with ICE in Utah and beyond

SALT LAKE CITY — Two Utah attorneys said they’re seeing an increase in federal law enforcers working with immigration enforcement agents to find and detain people under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“This is where you have special agents, you have HSI, you have people that don’t typically engage in this kind of work,” said attorney Adam Crayk, referring to the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations agency.

Crayk pointed to the detention of one of his clients, Utah musician John Shin, as evidence of the shift. An HSI agent was involved in detaining him in Colorado in August, according to a document detailing the circumstances of Shin’s arrest.

After Shin pleaded guilty to impaired driving in 2020, Crayk said his client’s protected status under DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, was revoked. It was Shin’s only conviction since moving to the U.S. from South Korea as a child in 1998, his attorney said.

“So you have law enforcement engaged in going after individuals like John, who plays the violin, who doesn’t have much history at all,” Crayk said.

Crayk is also a criminal defense attorney who represents people accused of taking part in large-scale drug trafficking operations. He told KSL he’s noticed a shift in that area, too.

He said he’s usually notified of those federal indictments once or twice a month, but said that hasn’t happened in months.

“Which, to me, says the people that we were relying on to do drug trafficking work, human trafficking work, they’ve been pulled away from some of that,” Crayk said, as those agents have been tapped to assist with immigration enforcement.

“That’s not to say that they’re stopped entirely,” Crayk added.

In response to questions about those prosecutions, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah told KSL the office doesn’t track that data. And while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Homeland Security Department didn’t respond to a request for comment, the FBI did.

“We have been asked for assistance, and we are sending special agents to these immigration enforcement efforts,” a spokesperson for the FBI’s Salt Lake City office said in a statement. “That includes assisting in cities where major operations are underway, and we have special agents embedded on teams with DHS.”

The agency’s resources “also include intelligence analysts and other support working from command posts,” the statement said. The FBI  didn’t answer KSL’s specific questions about how many of those resources are going to immigration enforcement.

Christopher Vizcardo, another Utah immigration lawyer, told KSL he was there in June when at least eight FBI officers and an ICE agent were looking for someone in particular, but detained that person’s spouse instead.

“This was on a Sunday morning. My client was on the way to church,” Vizcardo recalled.

He said his client in that case has no criminal record beyond traffic-related offenses from years ago — something KSL verified using Utah court records.

“There was no other crimes they had committed, no real crimes that they had committed,” he said.

Vizcardo said about 10 Utahns are arrested every day as part of immigration enforcement, and he doesn’t expect that to slow down.

Related: Federal government orders many immigrants to be held in ICE custody without bond