John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
A state-funded campaign that’s put dozens of extra state troopers on city streets this fall put 75 people in jail during patrols in Huron, Belle Fourche and Yankton, the South Dakota Highway Patrol said Friday.
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden announced the “Operation Prairie Thunder” in July as a two-pronged initiative that he said would improve public safety.
One piece of the operation involved the expansion of cooperation with federal immigration officials, in part by signing additional agreements between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the state’s Highway Patrol and Department of Corrections. South Dakota National Guard troops were also assigned to process ICE paperwork in Sioux Falls and Rapid City.
The other prong of Rhoden’s campaign was framed as an effort to target drug trafficking in the Sioux Falls area, a move welcomed by city officials during a July press conference, but that put pressure on the Minnehaha County Jail and the county public defender’s office through a crush of arrests. The first operation forced the jail to transport ICE detainees to other facilities to make space for suspected drug offenders.
The state patrol also misstated its arrest numbers in its initial reporting on its work in Sioux Falls, conflating arrests with citations, referring to the latter as arrests even when the person cited was never transported to jail. The patrol pledged to separate the figures in future reports on the operation.
Troopers have conducted six saturation patrols in Sioux Falls since Rhoden’s July announcement.
In a press release Friday, the Highway Patrol announced that it concluded another set of saturation patrols in Huron, Yankton and Belle Fourche on Dec. 5.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
Huron patrols generate concern
In a statement, Rhoden said the saturation patrols “are getting drugs off the streets and putting criminals behind bars – first in Sioux Falls, and now we’re protecting even more communities.”
The state did not announce in advance plans to shift its focus from Sioux Falls to other cities.
In Huron, among South Dakota’s most diverse cities on a per-capita basis, the November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
“There were a lot of (social media) posts telling people to stay home,” Van Diepen said of the November patrols. “If they stop somebody and they get arrested on drugs, people are going to assume that it’s ICE.”
ICE representatives have not responded to inquires from South Dakota Searchlight on operations in Huron.
Mayor Mark Robish told Searchlight “there were no ICE agents in town.”
“It was all Highway Patrol,” the mayor said.
Spokespeople for the Rhoden administration and highway patrol did not immediately respond to questions about when and why it moved the patrols out of Sioux Falls, if there are plans to target other communities, and what the total cost for the patrols has been so far.
The city of Brookings, meanwhile, posted a news release on the city website warning residents that Operation Prairie Thunder would arrive in that city on Dec. 17.
“The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations,” the release said.