Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents made nearly 20,000 arrests in D.C., Maryland and Virginia from the beginning of President Trump’s second administration last year through March 10, according to a Washington Post analysis of recent federal data.
By comparison, in the last full year of President Joe Biden’s administration, ICE recorded a little nearly 3,800 arrests in the region.
After a dramatic spike in immigration enforcement in D.C. last year, ICE arrests in the nation’s capital have fallen sharply since December, federal data shows. But the rate has remained relatively steady in Maryland and Virginia, where elected leaders and immigrant advocates say they are not seeing any indication that enforcement efforts are lessening.
“Even though there haven’t been a lot of the high-profile arrests that were happening in Minnesota or other places, we have not seen arrests in the community actually decrease in Maryland,” said Atenas Burrola Estrada, deputy program director at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights in Washington. Many of the arrests of immigrants, she said, are taking place at scheduled check-ins “when people are trying to comply with what immigration had required of them.”
The surge of ICE arrests in the region corresponds to national efforts undertaken by Trump who made eliminating illegal immigration a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign. In late January, then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem trumpeted the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, using figures that, the Associated Press noted in a recent article, experts have called into question.
“In President Trump’s first year back in office, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations and more than 675,000 deportations,” Noem said in a statement at the time.
In an analysis of ICE deportation data last month, the Associated Press put the number of deportations during Trump’s first year at about 400,000, while noting that the Department of Homeland Security has not explained how it arrived to its 2.2 million figure for self-deportations — a number the agency has not historically tracked.
Trump fired Noem in early March following questions about her leadership and her handling of the shooting deaths by federal officers of two U.S. citizens protesting immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota. She was replaced by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R), who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to head Homeland Security in late March.
In her January statement, Noem said that 70 percent of those arrested by ICE “are convicted criminals or have criminal charges.”
But of the roughly 19,500 people arrested by ICE in the District, Maryland and Virginia between Jan. 20, 2025 and March 10, 2026 about 11,600 — 60 percent — had no prior criminal record. Nationally, almost 40 percent of people arrested by ICE since start of the administration had no criminal record, according to recent federal data analyzed by The Washington Post obtained through an ongoing public-records request by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California at Berkeley.
The crackdown on illegal immigration in the District last year began in earnest on Aug. 11 with Trump’s declaration of a “crime emergency” in the city. ICE arrested more than 1,400 people in the District between August and November of last year. But from December through March 11, the latest available date in the data, the agency has made just over 100 arrests.
The drop-off followed a judge’s ruling in early December that the Trump administration’s escalating use of immigration arrests in D.C. without a warrant probably violated federal law. U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell criticized administration officials for depriving those people of their rights and basic necessities as they languished in cramped detention facilities before being released. Howell, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, criticized immigration authorities’ “systemic failure” to follow the law. She said top administration officials, including then Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, had repeatedly misstated the legal requirements for warrantless arrests in their public comments.
In addition to the people arrested in the D.C. region during check-in appointments at federal immigration offices, many others have been apprehended while on their way to work or school or out shopping, say local leaders and advocates for immigrants. Last year’s surge and the ongoing ICE enforcement efforts in the region have left many immigrants “worried, confused, scared,” said Rocio Treminio-Lopez, the mayor of Brentwood, Maryland, a small town with a large Latino population just outside of Washington.
Treminio-Lopez, who has been mayor since 2015, said she knew of “countless” immigrants who were arrested by ICE over the past year. One constituent, she said, was in the immigration process when he was arrested and held by ICE for 42 days before being released.
The crackdown has led immigrant families to recede from public life, avoid events and even keep their children out of after-school programs and weekend activities, Treminio-Lopez said. She said she worries that the effects of the surge of ICE arrests will be long-lasting and that people in the immigration system will no longer trust that the process will treat them fairly.
Arrests in Maryland began to climb in September 2025 and peaked in January with more than 800. More than 500 people were arrested a month on average after August, climbing from more than 300 in the prior months.
As the total number of arrests in Maryland climbed, immigrants who had no criminal histories increasingly became the target. From August onward, 70 percent of those arrested by ICE in Maryland had no criminal record, the federal data shows. That number peaked in February, when nearly 80 percent of those arrested had no record.
In Virginia, ICE averaged nearly 700 arrests a month between January and August 2025. From September through early March 2026, that number increased to more than 800. Since the start of the current Trump administration through early March, more than half of those arrested by ICE in Virginia have no criminal record. That percentage has remained consistent throughout the months. Since June, nearly 60 percent of those arrested had no criminal records.
The ongoing enforcement efforts have strained the lives of both immigrants pursuing documentation and of U.S. citizens who are their family members, friends and co-workers, said Amica’s Burrola Estrada.
“Honestly, I think the community is scared and rightfully so,” she said. “We have seen that communities of color have been targeted indiscriminately and we are seeing that people are in fact getting arrested, getting detained, people who should not have been.”
But, “the community continues resilient,” Burrola Estrada added. “People are continuing to live their lives even when those lives and their livelihoods are being threatened every day.”
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