ICE arrests soar as people with no criminal record are increasingly targeted

By ALBERT SUN and ALLISON McCANN

A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. They included people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.

A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were people who were accused of violating civil immigration laws but who had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of newl released federal data shows. The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4%.

Overall, immigration arrests rose to record highs with 43,000 ICE arrests in June and 49,000 in July. Two fatal shootings involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, in Texas and Maine, drew outrage but did not meaningfully slow the pace of arrests.

A representative for the Department of Homeland Security said that the administration was keeping its promises to arrest and deport criminals and that anyone in the country illegally was a target for enforcement.

The new data contains details on every ICE arrest through Aug. 5 and offers the fullest picture yet of how the agency’s activities have shifted since public backlash forced a retreat from the aggressive tactics seen in Minneapolis early this year. It was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, through a public records lawsuit and was analyzed by The New York Times.

After his confirmation this spring, the secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, promised quieter but more effective enforcement. ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

“They have more officers, more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “And they’re finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine.”

Immigration arrests are near all-time highs in almost every state. Even sparsely populated Montana and Vermont had spikes, with arrest rates more than doubling.

But the surge was strongest in Florida and Texas, two states with large immigrant populations and leaders friendly to the Trump administration’s crackdown.

ICE is making more than 380 arrests a day in Texas and more than 230 a day in Florida, with each state up by more than 100 arrests a day from the spring.

All the same, the increase has affected states led both by Republicans and by Democrats. In New Jersey and New Mexico, arrests have doubled, even though both states passed laws this year that restrict government cooperation with ICE.

ICE appears to be hitting new arrest records in a couple of ways: The agency has hired thousands more agents — growing to 29,000 employees in June, up from about 21,000 when Trump took office, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. And it has relied more on state and local law enforcement partners.

ICE has rapidly expanded a program to deputize local police officers to arrest immigrants. The share of people detained through the program, known as 287(g), is now around 14%, the data shows.

Florida has tallied at least 15,000 arrests through the program under Trump, the data shows, and Texas has notched nearly 10,000. But the program has been particularly important in smaller states such as Wyoming and West Virginia, where ICE’s presence is more limited. The share of 287(g) arrests in both states is now more than 50%.

Under Mullin’s tenure, the number of people in ICE detention initially declined but has slowly ticked back up.

The agency has not yet reached its stated goal of 100,000 detention beds, but with several new detention facilities opening this fall — and the possibility of reviving a plan to convert warehouses into detention centers — it appears poised to expand detention significantly in the next year.

Deportations have averaged well over 1,000 people a day since last summer, and there are signs that they are picking up speed. The number of deportation flights began rising in the spring, and in July reached a record of at least 329 flights out of the country, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a tracking effort run by Human Rights First.