ICE arrests
The New York Times used data from the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley to track the pace of daily arrests. During 2024, arrests averaged about 300 a day. At the outset of the Trump administration the pace jumped to 750, the settled in at about 600. The pace began to rise in late April, and then in early June jumped to over 1,000 a day. Thus, the pace of arrests now are triple over 2024.
In the first week of June, ICE data analyzed by Cato showed an average daily arrests of about 1,200 with 29% involving persons with convictions. Since January, the share of arrests (or detentions) without a conviction has risen from about half towards three quarters. More than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes. The appendix table at the end of this post has data by detailed crime and broad crime categorization.
This posting is on ICE’s power to arrest and detain.
Detentions
The number of persons in detention went over 50,000 in early June, rising from an average in 2024 of about 35,000. As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). This comes to an average of about persons a day. 15% of these cases involve property theft, violence or non-violent vice (such as drug offences).
During May, 28,000 were placed in detention – a daily average of about 950. While the number detained by Customs and Border Patrol has dropped, due to the collapse of the volume of persons crossing the Mexican border illegally (from 24,356 to 17,085), ICE detentions have soared (from 14,882 to 39,314). (These figures at January 26 and June 15.) The total of 53, 397 is comparable to the average of about 35,000 during 2024. 71% did not have a criminal record.
As of end of May, 185,825 persons were released by ICE with homing devices
Deportations
There is a wide gap between what DHS says and what the actual data show.
On June 10, the Department of Homeland Security provided TIME with updated figures from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: more than 207,000 deported. That represents a significant increase in the Administration’s deportations and may reflect the more sweeping and intrusive actions immigration officials have taken in recent weeks. For context, the federal government deported 271,484 people in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30.
According to a careful tracking of ICE data, between January and early June, 106,465 persons were deported. 99,481 were sent to western Hemisphere countries. The largest destination countries were Mexico (48,578), Guatemala (14,193), Honduras (12,214), El Salvador (4,697), and Colombia (3,858). These figures very roughly reflect their share of unauthorized persons in the U.S. except that Mexicans are estimated to comprise about 40% of unauthorized persons. (Go here.)
These deportation figures reflect longstanding migration patterns from Latin America and the Caribbean into the United States. When considering the entire Western Hemisphere—which includes nations across North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean—the total number of citations amounts to 99,481. This accounts for a substantial share of the dataset, underscoring the regional concentration of deportation cases.