Donald Trump’s administration hit record highs of monthly immigration enforcement arrests this summer, with more than 43,000 people arrested in June and another 50,000 arrested in July. But last month, for the first time since Trump took office, more than half of all people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no prior criminal convictions or pending charges. A growing majority of immigrants targeted by federal law enforcement officers have no criminal history whatsoever, as officers increasingly target immigrants whose legal status has lapsed or been stripped by the Trump administration, according to new reviews of federal data.
The share of arrests of immigrants with past violent criminal convictions fell to less than 4 percent. The administration has instead shifted its focus to legal immigration pathways, including people seeking asylum, the spouses of U.S citizens stuck in legal limbo, and refugees with temporary legal status whose humanitarian protections were revoked, forcing them to return to volatile countries they fled. Those immigrants, as well as immigrants already in the custody of local law enforcement, then become easy targets for arrest and removal.
Earlier this year, ICE officials told Congress that the agency plans to deport one million people — and hold at least 99,000 people on any given day in ICE detention centers — in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years. To meet those goals, the administration has pumped billions of dollars into the Department of Homeland Security, with ambitious plans to scale up detention space and hire more officers. Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been hoping to avoid damning images of militarized officers storming through cities that plagued his predecessor Kristi Noem, but the administration is now confronting scrutiny over the fatal shootings of two immigrants by ICE officers during traffic stops and a surge of arrests targeting immigrants who have been in the country for years without issue.
As ICE shifts away from arresting people with criminal records, the percentage of ICE “arrests” at prisons and jails has steadily fallen, according to data reviewed by the American Immigration Council. Instead, a growing share of ICE arrests are being carried out “at large,” or by officers who track down and arrest people at work, in their homes or in traffic stops. Roughly 63 percent of all ICE arrests were performed “at large” by an officer or through state and local police, according to the American Immigration Council.
Those arrests are often supported by state and local authorities through the 287(g) program, which effectively deputizes local police to carry out federal immigration enforcement. The number of people brought into ICE custody through the 287(g) program is now roughly 14 percent, according to data collected by the Deportation Data Project and reviewed by The New York Times. Florida police have tallied at least 15,000 such arrests under Trump, according to The Times review.
But the program has seen heavier impacts in states without a significant ICE footprint, including Wyoming and West Virginia, where 287(g) arrests in both states have hit more than than 50 percent. The administration also doesn’t appear to be targeting people with final orders of removal, decisions by immigration court judges requiring immigrants to leave the country. In the first week of August, roughly one quarter of arrests targeted people with final orders of removal.
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