The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has led to a significant change in strategy, as federal officers shift away from focusing on arresting immigrants already held in local jails to tracking them down on the streets and in communities, according to a Washington Post analysis of government data.
The result has been a huge surge of such at-large arrests, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement tallying about 17,500 in September and on pace to exceed that in October. (The data The Post examined had been updated through the middle of that month.) That was far more than any other month included in the data, which dated back to October 2011.
Before this year, the highest number of at-large arrests came in January 2023, when the Biden administration made more than 11,500. ICE is making more than four times as many at-large arrests per week as it did in President Donald Trump’s first term, the analysis found.
The Post’s analysis highlights a broader pattern in how the Department of Homeland Security is approaching enforcement, even as authorities insist that immigration officers are focusing on violent criminals who they describe as “the worst of the worst.” Government data shows that more than 60 percent of the people detained in at-large arrests since June did not have criminal convictions or pending charges.
Former DHS officials said the effort demonstrates a less targeted approach and reflects mounting pressure from senior White House and DHS officials to boost deportation totals.
“That is consistent with their mandate to remove anybody in the country who doesn’t have authorization,” said Sarah Saldaña, who served as ICE director under President Barack Obama. “To me, that is a waste of resources.”
The administration’s new approach began to take shape in June, when federal immigration agents launched a large-scale enforcement operation in Los Angeles. In the ensuing five months, ICE’s at-large arrests in communities nationwide totaled 67,800, more than twice the total number during the previous five months.
In June, September and October, such arrests — which include people detained in their homes, at work sites, during immigration check-ins, or in other public spaces — accounted for more than half of ICE’s total number of monthly arrests for the first time since April 2023.
Administration officials have set a goal of 1 million deportations in Trump’s first year of his second term, and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has pressed for 3,000 immigration arrests per day.
Daily arrests are lagging well behind that number. The highest number of single-day arrests by ICE took place when its officers detained more than 1,900 on June 4.
The total number of overall arrests, however, rose by 60 percent in the period from June through mid-October, compared with the first five months of the Trump administration, the data showed. In September, ICE had 21 days in which it made 1,000 or more arrests, the highest number of such days in any month this year.
“The shift in tactics is related to the ongoing process from the White House to up numbers, and the easiest way to do that is to do broader-brush approaches,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official in the Biden administration.
ICE is the lead federal agency in charge of immigration enforcement inside the United States, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) typically focuses on the border. Historically, ICE officers have detained most immigrants inside prisons or jails after they have been charged with a crime or completed their sentences.
Many local jails flag undocumented immigrants for removal and contact ICE directly. ICE also has the authority to monitor local arrests through a fingerprint-sharing program. The agency often files a detainer requesting that jails hold potential deportees for up to 48 hours for federal officers to take custody.
By comparison, at-large arrests typically require more human and financial resources to carry out, immigration experts said. ICE’s website says that such arrests “are unpredictable and can be dangerous to the public.”
In a statement, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said 70 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States and that some have convictions or charges in their home countries.
The Post’s examination found that from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, through Oct. 15 about 36 percent of ICE detainees had criminal convictions and 30 percent had pending charges.
“This story only reveals how the media manipulates data to peddle a false narrative that DHS is not targeting the worst of the worst,” McLaughlin said. “Nationwide our law enforcement is targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists.”
The DHS data for this story was obtained through a public records request filed by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers that collects and releases immigration enforcement data. The Post used to the data to conduct its own analysis.
The data does not include information on immigration arrests made by other federal departments, including CBP, whose Border Patrol division has taken on an increasingly prominent role in the Trump administration’s enforcement strategy in recent months. In Chicago, Border Patrol agents came under federal court scrutiny for the deployment of tear gas in response to protesters.
As the overall number of arrests increased nationally, the number of people without a criminal record arrested by ICE since June nearly tripled, according to The Post’s analysis. (That includes both at-large arrests and arrests at jails.) Since September, more than 40 percent of those arrested by ICE had no criminal records.
That trend is continuing. Nearly half of the 79,000 people ICE arrested and placed in detention between Oct. 1 and the end of November did not have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, according to separate government data obtained by The Post. (Those arrests included CBP arrests, which make up a small percentage of the total.) Of the migrants who do have criminal convictions, nearly a quarter were traffic offenses, that data showed.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said that the data showing relatively few detainees have committed serious crimes is not surprising.
“ICE is getting the worst of the worst,” she said. “But they’re also picking up a lot of people who either have no criminal charge … or convictions — or they have relatively minor convictions.”
Federal data suggests that the administration’s goal of boosting detentions was aided by high-profile targeted enforcement operations that lasted for weeks in large cities, including Los Angeles; Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago; many of which drew significant public protests.
The District of Columbia experienced the largest spike in arrests, with the number increasing fivefold from June through October as compared with the previous five months, the federal data showed.
In Illinois, 428 people were arrested between Jan. 20 and May 31 who had no criminal records. That number more than tripled to 1,408 from June 1 through Oct. 15, a period that included a targeted enforcement campaign in Chicago titled “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration, said that the Trump administration is “trying to find the lowest bar of calling somebody a criminal.”
Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.
Methodology
The Post analyzed arrest data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers that collects and releases immigration enforcement data. The data is up-to-date through Oct. 15.
The data lists each person apprehended by the federal agency and includes their birth year, sex and country of citizenship, along with the state where they were arrested and the date of their arrest. It also includes whether the individual had any previous criminal convictions or charges, and the general circumstances under which ICE arrested the individual.
ICE is authorized to arrest people in a variety of situations: Some are picked up at probation offices or from local or federal jails, where they’ve been detained by law enforcement. Others are arrested in the community through worksite raids or other methods. To identify such at-large arrests, The Post focused on records where the apprehension method was labeled “located,” “noncustodial,” and “worksite enforcement” signifying that the arrests took place in the community and not in a jail.
The datasets included duplicate records. The Post identified and filtered out records where the unique identifier and the arrest date are the same. In all, the newspaper removed more than 5,500 records, working with more than 99 percent of the original data.
The post ICE shift in tactics leads to soaring number of at-large arrests, data shows appeared first on Washington Post.
