How Trump has supercharged the immigration crackdown

The Guardian

2 days ago

In the six months since Donald Trump took office, the US president has supercharged the country's immigration enforcement apparatus – pushing immigration officials to arrest a record number of people in June.
A Guardian analysis of arrest and deportation data has revealed that Trump is now overseeing a sweeping mass arrest and incarceration scheme.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency does not publish daily arrest, detention and deportation data. But a team of lawyers and academics from the Deportation Data Project used a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain a dataset that provides the most detailed picture yet of the US immigration enforcement and detention system under Trump.
A Guardian analysis of the dataset found:
In June this year, average daily arrests were up 268% compared with June 2024.
Ice is increasingly targeting any and all unauthorized immigrants, including people who have no criminal records.
Despite Trump's claims that his administration is seeking out the 'worst of the worst', the majority of people being arrested by Ice now have no criminal convictions.
Detention facilities have been increasingly overcrowded, and the US system is over capacity by more than 13,500 people.
The number of deportations, however, has fluctuated as the administration pursues new strategies and policies to swiftly expel people from the US.
The US government has deported more than 8,100 people to countries that are not their home country.
Within weeks of Trump's inauguration, Ice tripled its number of daily arrests.
Daily arrests spiked further after a heated meeting on 21 May, when Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, ordered Ice officials to aim for 3,000 arrests a day, or a million a year.
In early June, Ice arrests peaked at about 1,000 a day – far short of Miller's benchmark, but 42% higher than the average daily arrests in May and 268% higher than in June 2024.
On 4 June, Ice arrested nearly 2,000 people – the highest number of people arrested in a single day, according to nearly 10 years of arrest records. For the first time since Ice started releasing detailed data, the number of non-criminal arrests overtook the number of arrests of people with criminal convictions or pending charges.
That month, during large-scale raids in Los Angeles, armed federal agents acting on Miller's explicit instructions began detaining immigrant workers at car washes, at garment factories and outside Home Depot stores. Agents with armored vehicles and military-style gear descended upon public parks; masked agents grabbed street vendors and restaurant workers.
Although Trump has repeatedly claimed his administration is trying to arrest and deport 'dangerous criminals' and the 'worst of the worst', most of the people Ice is now arresting have never been convicted of a crime.
In early July, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order against the government's aggressive immigration sweeps in LA, barring federal agents from stopping people in the region unless there is 'reasonable suspicion' that a person is violating immigration law. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit, filed by immigrant advocacy groups, that accused immigration officials of racially profiling residents.
Ice arrests are up across the country and have more than doubled in 38 states. Most of the arrests have occurred in Texas, Florida and California – each of which have large immigrant populations.
Arrests have especially ramped up in the southern and western states that have eagerly backed Trump's immigration agenda, volunteering state resources and law enforcement personnel to work with federal officials seeking to detain immigrants.
As the Trump administration ramps up immigration arrests, Ice detention facilities are becoming increasingly overcrowded.
The average number of people held in Ice detention jumped from 40,000 right before Trump's inauguration, to about 55,000 in late June. Congress, however, last allocated funding for only about 41,500 detainee beds.
In legal filings following the LA raids, immigrants who were arrested said they were held in federal buildings without adequate access to water, food and medications. Family members and lawyers struggled to locate and contact people in Ice custody.
After a visit to the Adelanto detention center in California's high desert in June, the US representative Judy Chu wrote that detainees were being held in filthy, 'inhumane' conditions and had not been provided a change in underwear for 10 days. Across the US, immigrants in detention have reported overcrowded conditions and moldy and inadequate food.
Human rights experts have also raised concerns about the detention of children with their parents at the newly recommissioned 'family detention centers' in Texas – warning that even short periods of incarceration can have major mental health and developmental consequences in young people. Families, too, have said there is a lack of fresh, drinkable water and child-friendly food in these facilities. The immigrant rights group Raices said that one of the families it represents had a nine-month-old baby who lost more than 8lbs while in detention.
The president's omnibus spending bill, which was signed into law this month, has allocated $45bn to expand Ice's sprawling detention system – roughly doubling the agency's capacity to detain people over the next several years.
The agency is concurrently changing policies to make it easier to detain more people and for longer periods of time. In a recent memo, Ice's acting director Todd Lyons, declared that immigrants fighting deportation in court will no longer be eligible for bond hearings – meaning that millions would have to remain in detention for months or years while their cases are processed.
Despite deploying federal agents across the US to arrest more immigrants and despite incarcerating a record number of immigrants in detention facilities, the Trump administration has not managed to dramatically ramp up the scale of deportations.
That's in part because during the Biden administration, most expulsions occurred at the US southern border – where Customs and Border Protection turned back immigrants seeking to enter the US. Since taking office, Trump has closed the southern border to tens of thousands of people who had been waiting to cross into the US legally and apply for asylum. The number of immigrant apprehensions at the border have dropped by more than 50% since January.
Instead, the administration has refocused intensely on arresting and deporting immigrants within the US – many of whom have been living in the country for years, and have legitimate claims to fight deportation.
This shift has meant that even as arrests and detentions have surged, the number of deportations has fluctuated under the second Trump administration.
But the administration is still vying to keep its promise of mass deportations and, since Trump taking office, has deported more than 127,000 people.
To speed up the removal of those people, the administration has deployed a number of policy changes – including a campaign to arrest people at immigration courthouses so they can be swiftly deported. Across the US, federal prosecutors have abruptly asked judges to dismiss immigration cases – levying a legal maneuver that allows Ice agents waiting outside courtrooms to arrest immigrants and immediately place them in deportation proceedings without hearings. In a recent class-action lawsuit, a coalition of advocacy groups have argued that the scheme violates federal immigration laws and the US constitution.
Over the past six months, Mexico alone has received more than 63,000 deportees from the US. Central and South American countries have also received tens of thousands of deportees.
The Trump administration has terminated temporary humanitarian relief for immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela; those countries have each received nearly 22,000 deportees since late January.
The administration has also been seeking to make deals with countries around the globe to accept immigrants that the US cannot easily deport to their home countries, ramping up so-called 'third-country' deportations.
In late June, the US supreme court cleared the way for the administration to send immigrants to countries where they have no connection, without a meaningful opportunity to contest the deportations on grounds that they could face torture.
The administration has sent more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador, where they remain incarcerated in the country's most notorious mega-prison. It has also sent families from Russia to Costa Rica, and men from various countries to South Sudan and Eswatini – two countries in the midst of political upheaval and human rights crises.