source: American Immigration Council
President Donald Trump came into office with a promise to carry out mass deportations, with the aim to hit one million deportations per year. While he often claims his administration focuses on “the worst of the worst,” new ICE data released by U.C. Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project reveals the full extent of ICE’s operations in Trump’s first year back in office, and the unprecedented ways in which the administration has unleashed ICE agents across American communities.
Before Trump took office, data shows that in late 2024, ICE was carrying out roughly 300 arrests per day. Of those arrests, nearly two-thirds were of people who were held in federal, state, or local jails and prisons at the time; so-called “custodial” arrests. A far smaller number (roughly 75 per day) occurred outside of custodial settings; so-called “at-large” arrests. The vast majority of those arrested by ICE had some form of interaction with the criminal legal system; 56% had at least one prior conviction (no matter how minor), 28% had at least one pending criminal charge, and just 16% had no criminal record.
Who is ICE arresting?
When Trump took office in January 2025, ICE’s largest arrest surge focused on people who were already in criminal custody, with greater manpower fueled by the diversion of thousands of federal agents working for agencies like the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and even the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Police. While all arrests increased, including so-called “collateral” arrests of people questioned near a specific ICE target, most ICE arrests during spring 2025 continued to occur at law enforcement facilities where people were already in criminal custody.
This changed in June 2025, just weeks after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reportedly frustrated with the slow increase in ICE arrests, called the head of every ICE Field Office into a room in Washington, DC and ordered them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Following this meeting, the Trump administration launched its first splashy raid of an American city, sending hundreds of agents into Los Angeles and sparking fiery confrontations between protestors and federal agents.
How many people is ICE arresting with no criminal records?
By the peak of Trump’s mass deportations in January 2026 during the ill-fated Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, ICE arrest statistics looked very different than a year earlier.
For much of last fall to winter, most of ICE’s daily arrests occurred “at-large” in American communities — including raids in Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. From December 2025 through January 2026, ICE arrested on average 1,264 people per day, over a 300% increase from the year before.
Figure 1: Average Daily ICE Arrests, by Type of Arrest
At its peak in December, ICE was arresting over 800 people a day on the streets of American communities; and far from being “the worst of the worst,” the majority had no criminal record; and among those that did, most had only low-level offenses. Two out of every three “at-large” arrests during the winter were of people with no criminal record and just 17% had any prior criminal conviction. And out of that group, just one-third were classified as the most serious offenders by ICE.
In other words, the idea that ICE was out in the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis to round up “the worst of the worst” is provably false. For every one ICE “at-large” arrest in December through January that involved someone with a prior criminal conviction classified as the most serious threat risk, there were 12 arrests of people with no criminal record at all.
Notably, following the disastrous end of Operation Metro Surge, which led to the resignations of the Border Patrol’s “Commander at Large” Gregory Bovino and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE has reduced the use of at-large arrests. As of early March, for the first time since summer 2025, at-large arrests have consistently dropped to roughly the same level or below custodial arrests. This is part of a shift to what new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has described as a “quiet way” of carrying out mass deportations; a focus on increasing the pressure on undocumented immigrants to “voluntarily” leave the country by making it clear that the entire weight of the federal government will work to prevent them from remaining in the country.
Whether this means that ICE will stop carrying out large-scale raids on American cities remains to be seen. But the data consistently shows that despite this slow-down, every week thousands of long-time residents continue to be arrested and thrown into detention centers despite lengthy ties to American communities and no criminal records.
Rising use of state cooperation
The ICE data also shows the Trump administration’s rising reliance on agreements with state and local governments which permit police to carry out some of the functions of ICE agents, including carrying out immigration arrests in some cases. The most significant use of these so-called “287(g) agreements” so far has been in Florida and Texas, where most state law enforcement authorities have signed agreements with ICE.
In Florida, for example, in 2024 just 13% of immigration arrests occurred through the 287(g) program, primarily using the “Warrant Service Officer” model, where ICE worked with jails to turn over people who had been taken into criminal custody. By the first two months of 2026, after Florida had aggressively ramped up immigration enforcement, a total of 29% of all immigration arrests in Florida occurred through a 287(g) program.
As a result, despite the fact that California has an undocumented population twice the size of Florida, ICE consistently arrests more people in Florida than in California and consistently arrests significantly more people in Texas than in any other state.
Figure 2: Monthly ICE Arrests by Selected States, October 2024 to February 2026
Deportations increase dramatically, but fail to hit Trump’s targets
In 2009, at the start of President Barack Obama’s first term, ICE set a record which stood for over a decade, deporting 238,000 people who had been arrested in the interior of the United States. ICE is now on track to surpass that annual record — and may have already done so.
Data reveals that ICE is now routinely deporting over 30,000 people a month directly from detention centers, which does not include those who “self-deport” through CBP Home or those who are granted “voluntary departure” by an immigration judge and permitted to depart on their own. This suggests ICE will surpass the 2009 record at some point in 2026, with removals averaging over 1,000 per day last winter. However, there is no sign that Trump is anywhere close to the promised one million deportations per year, which would require an average of 2,739 deportations per day.
Figure 3: ICE Removals from Detention by Month, 2024 to February 2026
The Trump administration’s claim that it has been primarily deporting “the worst of the worst” is a lie. More than one out of three people deported from detention in 2025 had no criminal record at all; neither pending criminal charges nor any prior criminal conviction. Just 2% of those deported from detention in 2025 were tagged as suspected gang members in ICE’s data, and just 0.4% were tagged as “known or suspected terrorists” (despite the Trump administration having designated Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and other transnational criminal organizations as terrorist groups).
Among those deported from detention in 2025 who did have a criminal conviction, the majority (64%) had nothing more serious than a misdemeanor.
Deportation Data Project shows why ICE needs to be more transparent
The data released through the Deportation Data Project has allowed a wealth of analysis into ICE’s operations and crucially shows that the public statements made by the Trump administration are often undermined by reality. But this data was only released following a lawsuit brought against ICE under the Freedom of Information Act. Since taking office, the Trump administration has made a number of statistical claims — about arrests, detentions, and removals — without publishing any data which supports their assertions. In fact, ICE today is publishing less data than when Trump came into office, despite the administration’s repeated (and false) claims to be the “most transparent in history.”
It should not take a lawsuit to get the truth. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s efforts to put propaganda over reality make that a requirement. By shining a light on Trump’s mass deportation operations, the statistics reveal what is actually happening on the ground, and the lives that are being impacted; not just the “worst of the worst” but hundreds of thousands of long-time residents with no criminal records, and people caught up while going about their daily lives.
