Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 10,000 people in a five-day span at the end of June, underscoring a significant escalation by the agency responsible for advancing the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.
The figures, shared by a person familiar with the data who requested anonymity because the information has not been made public, follow a shift in ICE strategy away from highly visible enforcement operations in major U.S. cities and toward less conspicuous methods aimed at meeting President Donald Trump’s deportation targets.
The numbers suggest that even as the administration moves away from city-specific crackdowns, immigration arrests are not only continuing but accelerating.
The 10,000 arrests occurred between Friday, June 26, and Tuesday, June 30, averaging about 2,000 arrests a day. It was not immediately clear where the arrests were carried out.
The New York Times was the first to report the surge in arrests.
“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Our message is clear: if you come to our country illegally, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you.”
The arrest figures come as ICE detention numbers also rose in June, reaching about 39,000 people after staying near 30,000 per month since February, according to information obtained by The Associated Press.
ICE does not routinely publish arrest data, making direct comparisons with earlier periods challenging. Still, data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and reviewed by The Associated Press indicates that an average of 2,000 arrests per day would represent a steep increase from prior levels.
December had the most ICE arrests since the beginning of the Trump administration, and that month only averaged 1,283 arrests per day nationwide.
In January, at a time when the administration flooded the streets of Minneapolis and surrounding regions with hundreds of immigration enforcement officers, arrests averaged about 1,212 per day across the country.
But Minneapolis proved to be a turning point in the Trump administration’s mass deportations agenda after two American citizens were killed by immigration officers while protesting the crackdown in Minneapolis.
Border Czar Tom Homan started drawing down the number of officers in Minnesota as the agency stepped back from the flashy surge operations that had been common during the tenure of then- Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Operations under Noem, headed by former Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, were marked by frequent clashes between immigration enforcement officers and protesters, in footage that was often splashed across the Department’s social media channels.
In February, immigration arrests fell to 1,057 a day, according to information from the Deportation Data Project. The Project sued through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the ICE arrest data, and it is only current through February.
After Noem was fired, her successor at Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, suggested he’d be taking a more low-profile approach to immigration enforcement, and he aimed to get the department out of the headlines. But Mullin was expected to adopt Trump’s priorities on immigration.
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