The pace of daily immigration arrests fell nearly 20 percent in July, as the Trump administration confronted court challenges, threats against agents, and continued protests against its mass deportation plans.
Between July 1 and 27, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement averaged 990 daily arrests, down from 1,224 the previous month, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research project based at Syracuse University.
Despite the slowing pace of arrests, which federal officials partially pinned on a series of recent California court rulings stopping agents from making indiscriminate arrests across the state, removals from the country were up an average of 84 more people per day during the same period.
"Despite a historic number of injunctions — including the (temporary restraining order) in Los Angeles — ICE continues to arrest the worst of the worst," Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Axios, which first reported on the drop. "From gang members and terrorists to pedophiles, everyday ICE is removing these barbaric criminal illegal aliens from American communities.”
The figures fall well short of the reported 3,000 arrests per day that White House deputy chief of staff and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller has reportedly urged agents to achieve.
Miller told Fox News in June that agents had been set a target of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, though the administration has since said in court there’s no formal arrest quota in place.
Nonetheless, mass immigration raids have still shaken communities across the country.
Agents carried out a major operation against two legal cannabis farms in Southern California on July 10, leading to at least 361 arrests, according to federal officials.
In the chaos, a man fell from a green house and died, and hundreds of protesters faced off against immigration agents.
Guadalupe Torres said her husband, George Retes, 25, an Army veteran and U.S. citizen who works as a security guard at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, was among those arrested, leaving her to fruitlessly call local law enforcement agencies to find out where he was being detained
"He really did try to leave, so I don't know what's going to happen from here. I really hope I get a phone call or something, because I'm getting torn apart. My kids are asking where their dad is. I keep having to lie, saying he's at work," Torres told ABC 7 at the time.
Retes, who said he told agents he was a U.S. citizen working legally at the farm, was subsequently released without charge, and said he plans to sue, though he’s not sure which agency arrested him and held him in downtown Los Angeles for several days.
"No one should be put in this position. It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant, it doesn't matter the color of your skin. It doesn't matter if you voted left, it doesn't matter if you voted right... No one deserves to be treated this way," Retes told reporters in July. "It shouldn't have happened and I hope this never happens to anyone ever again."
On the ground, the nature of immigration raids has diverged slightly in red and blue states under the second Trump administration.
In red states, about 60 percent of immigration arrests have taken place in prisons and jails, while 70 percent of arrests in blue states took place in the wider community, according to a CNN analysis.
The split is partially a result of many Democrat-led jurisdictions limiting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials.
In practice, advocates say, it leads to harsher enforcement tactics against liberal areas with large immigrant populations.
Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, told CNN he sees “a deliberate federal strategy to punish Massachusetts and other immigrant-friendly states for standing up against Trump’s reckless deportation machine.”
The federal government, meanwhile, says the continued demonization of immigration agents has put them in danger and hampered operations.
The Department of Homeland Security said in July that agents are facing an 830 percent increase in assaults, though federal officials thus far have not provided detailed evidence of their claims.
Immigration operations are expected to scale up exponentially in the coming years, thanks to an infusion of about $170 billion in border and immigration funding as part of the administration’s One Big, Beautiful Bill spending package.
