The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency has exponentially increased the arrest and detention of immigrants without any criminal history since the second Trump administration took office, a data analysis by the Guardian shows.
The information sharply contradicts Donald Trump’s claims the authorities are targeting “criminals” for deportation as part of his aggressive anti-immigration agenda.
According to numbers gathered from Ice and the Vera Institute of Justice, after Trump returned to the White House in late January there was a steep surge in arrests of immigrants, in general. One of the sharpest increases in arrest numbers has been of immigrants with pending charges, who have not yet been convicted of any crimes.
But the biggest increase has been people with no charges at all. Between early January, right before the inauguration, and June, there has been an 807% increase in the arrest of immigrants with no criminal record.
The Department of Homeland Security and top White House officials continue to claim that Ice is targeting “criminals” and “criminal illegal aliens”. But the Ice data shows the agency is not just targeting those with criminal records. Being undocumented in the US is a civil infraction, not a criminal offense.
“The group of people arrested with only immigration violations used to be very, very small,” said Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The data reflects the fact that Ice is in the community, arresting an awful lot of people who don’t have criminal histories. It doesn’t reflect what the agency has claimed they’re doing, which is going after the hardened criminals first, which I don’t think the data supports.”
Ice is certainly arresting people with criminal records, but the administration has not published data on what crimes people have been convicted of. Detailed statistics on arrestees is not available for 2025, but between October 2022 and November 2024, 78% of people arrested by the agency had a misdemeanor conviction or no conviction at all.
Only 21% of people over that two year time period had a felony criminal conviction, a Guardian analysis of monthly Ice enforcement and removal operations shows. It is impossible to know how many people arrested since January have a felony criminal conviction because the government has not released that data.
The sharpest increase in non-criminal arrests is following a late-May meeting, in which Trump administration officials yelled at top Ice officials, ordering them to arrest more immigrants. During that meeting, DHS secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller ordered Ice to arrest at least 3,000 people per day, which would be 1 million per year.
Trump ran on a campaign of engaging in “mass deportations” and since he took office his administration has escalated its tactics to meet that goal.
As the Guardian reported this month, on 31 May, top Ice managers instructed officers throughout the country to “turn the creative knob up to 11” to increase arrests. The internal Ice emails reviewed by the Guardian show officers were told to interview and potentially arrest “collaterals”, meaning people coincidentally present during an arrest. In the past, Ice typically targeted immigrants with arrest warrants. Now more people without any criminal history are being swept up in the dragnet.
And the Trump White House has ordered an increase in the number of officials engaging in immigration enforcement operations. Special agents from various federal law enforcement agencies – including the FBI, the DEA, the ATF and Homeland Security Investigations – have been delegated to perform immigration enforcement work. There has also been an increase in the number of local jurisdictions deputized by Ice to carry out immigration enforcement work.
The increase in immigration arrests has led to a rise in the number of people detained in Ice facilities nationwide. Kocher has been documenting these numbers closely, and tracked that as of 1 June, there were 51,302 people detained in immigration jails – the highest number since 2019.
According to Kocher, the Trump administration has increased the number of people in detention so quickly that it is challenging to provide meaningful oversight.
“We know that these facilities are overcrowded, they’re over capacity for what they are designed for,” said Kocher. “Practically speaking, it means people are sleeping on the floor, they may not be getting enough food, they’re almost certainly not getting adequate medical care.”
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security told the Guardian that “since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, we have arrested over 236,000 illegal aliens and have deported over 207,000”. However, according to the government’s own data, since October, 186,000 people have been booked into immigration detention for the first time. DHS did not respond to follow-up questions regarding the discrepancy between the government data and the numbers the Trump administration is publicizing.
Kocher said, in response to the discrepancy in the numbers: “I think they’re being dishonest and un-transparent because they are counting things in ways they have never been counted before to favor their political agenda and the perception they are trying to send to the base.”
For advocates, one of the most outrageous steps has been the practice of engaging in arrests at immigration courts around the country. Asylum seekers going through the lengthy legal process of requesting to stay in the US have been targeted by immigration officials. After government attorneys dismiss their cases, Ice officials waiting in hallways or lobbies have arrested asylum seekers.
Organizations are challenging the Trump administration’s increasing efforts to arrest people at immigration courts.
Last week, Innovation Law Lab, a legal organization that represents immigrants in civil rights cases, filed a suit against the Trump administration in Oregon to block the practice of courthouse arrests.
