WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration, according to new figures.
The spike in immigration arrests shows that the administration has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention but have nonetheless been disruptive.
The July arrest tally of 49,571 marks a 15% jump from 43,021 arrests a month earlier and a 70% increase from 29,241 in February, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, according to government data that was provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by The Associated Press.
As part of the surging arrest numbers over recent weeks and bolstered by a hiring surge, ICE has made arrests at traffic stops. The agency has increasingly relied on state and local law enforcement partners who are assuming immigration enforcement duties. And ICE officers have started to arrest people from Haiti who've seen their protections from deportation stripped away.
The new arrest numbers show the administration “didn’t stop the enforcement,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for more immigration restrictions.
“They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective.”
State partnerships becoming key to immigration enforcement
Immigration arrests the month before President Donald Trump returned to office hovered a little over 8,000, a figure largely made up of immigrants transferred from city or state jails and prisons and turned over to ICE to remove from the country. During Trump’s first year back in office, the numbers started climbing as the administration loosened restrictions on where and whom ICE could arrest while it also infused the agency with billions of dollars.
By December, the number of arrests jumped to more than 40,177, according to the data, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Homeland Security largely stopped reporting immigration enforcement data at the beginning of the second Trump administration, making the data from the Deportation Data Project one of the few insights into how the agency is operating.
In the aftermath of two fatal shootings in Minnesota in January that sparked protests and an uproar from Democratic lawmakers, arrests began to fall in February. After remaining stagnant for months, the numbers surged in June and then again in July.
The number of arrests made by state and local police departments who partner with ICE has dramatically increased over the last year. Those partnerships, which ICE has grown with the help of generous financial incentives for participating agencies, accounted for 6,500 arrests in July, or about 13% of the total, the data showed. A year earlier, they accounted for less than 5% of ICE’s monthly arrests.
Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 20,000 of the July arrests, in a sign of how important those states have become to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Both states have leaned heavily into those cooperation deals with ICE, known as 287g agreements, that allow local and state law enforcement to essentially operate as arms of federal immigration enforcement.
That close cooperation is increasingly resulting in arrests like one last week in Florida's Key West. The manager at the Half Shell Raw Bar said Tuesday that one of his staff members, a 36-year-old asylum seeker who fled Haiti in 2017 after receiving death threats, was arrested by local police and turned over to ICE.
The manager, Bobby Kuchinsky, said the man had worked as a cook and supervisor at the restaurant and was the main provider of his family. Kuchinsky declined to identify the man out of concern for his safety while in custody.
“He was an excellent worker, he learned very fast, he never had any problem with the law,” Kuchinsky said in an interview with the AP, noting that it will be a challenge to replace him. “He was a nice kid, he was a family man.”
DHS secretary pledged a quieter approach but mass deportations still a priority
In his confirmation hearing earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pledged to keep ICE out of the headlines, suggesting that the administration’s immigration crackdown might take a softer approach. But his tenure has been marred by a number of fatal shootings of immigrants in encounters with ICE officers. And the figures show Mullin hasn’t shifted the agency from Trump’s vision for mass deportations.
Under Mullin's predecessor, Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was often characterized by high-profile operations that targeted specific Democratic cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Operations, often led by former Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino, were blasted out on social media videos showing officers bursting out of moving vans to chase people or rappelling from helicopters onto apartment rooftops.
But Krikorian said those tactics were “provoking a lot of ordinary people, turning them off even if they liked the idea of the immigration law being enforced."
New data shows most immigrants arrested didn't have criminal history
The administration has often said its immigration enforcement operations target people who have committed crimes in the U.S. and as a way to make the country safer.
But the data shows that more than half of those arrested in July had not been convicted of any crimes and were not facing any criminal charges. Less than a quarter of those arrested had been convicted of a crime.
And half of the arrests were non-custodial, which means ICE agents arrested people in the community rather than someone already behind bars or held by local police.
Patricia Quiñonez, a journalist at Utahzolanos, which covers the Venezuelan immigrant community in Utah, said immigration arrests during traffic stops have increased sharply in recent months.
“They stop you for whatever reason — for example, you don’t have a driver's license, your vehicle tags are expired, your windows are more tinted than what is allowed. From there, they take advantage of the situation and ask about immigration.”
People with valid work permits and pending asylum claims are among those arrested, said Quiñonez, who believes they are being targeted by race.
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Salomon reported from Miami, Sullivan from Minneapolis and Foley from Iowa City, Iowa. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed.
