ICE arrests reached a second-term high of 49,571 in July
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 49,571 people in July, the highest monthly total during President Donald Trump’s second administration, according to administrative data provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press.
The July total was 15% higher than the 43,021 arrests recorded in June and 70% higher than the 29,241 recorded in February. The figures show that interior immigration enforcement remained at a high level while the mix of arrests increasingly included encounters outside jails and prisons.
About half of July arrests were made outside custody
ICE arrests can begin in different ways. A custodial arrest generally follows a person’s transfer from a jail or prison. A non-custodial, or at-large, arrest takes place in the community, including during traffic stops, immigration check-ins, airport encounters or other contacts.
About half of the July arrests were non-custodial, according to the released data and reporting on it. That means a substantial share of the month’s enforcement activity involved people who were not already held in a criminal-justice facility.
The data also classified more than half of those arrested in July as having no recorded criminal conviction or charge. That is a description of the records and categories available in the dataset; it is not proof that every person in that group had never been arrested, had no prior criminal contact or posed no public-safety concern.
The Department of Homeland Security disputes how the figures should be interpreted. A DHS spokesperson told The Washington Post that nearly 70% of people arrested had criminal convictions or pending charges and said the data used in the reporting had not been reviewed, audited or given agency context. That is the department’s position and does not independently resolve the difference between DHS’s characterization and the Deportation Data Project’s analysis.
State and local participation is growing
State and local law-enforcement agencies participating in ICE partnerships accounted for about 6,500 July arrests, or roughly 13% of the total. A year earlier, those agencies accounted for less than 5% of ICE’s monthly arrests.
Those partnerships operate under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the program, ICE may delegate specified immigration-enforcement functions to state and local officers. The officers work under agreements with ICE, federal supervision and agency oversight, and the exact duties depend on the model and terms of each agreement.
Texas and Florida together accounted for nearly 20,000 July arrests, making the two states central to the administration’s state-local cooperation strategy. The figures do not mean that all of those arrests were made by state or local officers; the data separately identifies arrests involving participating partner agencies.
What the data does — and does not — show
The broader ICE dataset was released by the Deportation Data Project on August 24, 2026, after the project received records from ICE. The dataset covers records through August 6, 2026, and was obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The project said it released the data quickly after checking it and before completing its own analysis.
The project has cautioned that some fields have limitations. In particular, arrest-location information may be incomplete or entered inconsistently, so the records should not be used to draw strong conclusions from city-level patterns without additional review.
An ICE arrest is not the same as a deportation, removal order, criminal conviction or final immigration-court outcome. After an arrest, a person may be detained, released, placed in immigration-court proceedings, removed or receive another outcome depending on the facts of the case.
For people who may be affected, the practical distinction is important: a local officer working under a 287(g) agreement does not automatically have unlimited federal immigration authority, and an ICE arrest does not by itself determine a person’s final legal status. Individual cases can turn on immigration history, court orders, pending applications and other facts, so qualified legal assistance may be necessary.
Sources
- Associated Press: July ICE arrests reached a second-term high
- Deportation Data Project: ICE data release, October 2022–August 2026
- ICE: Partner With ICE Through the 287(g) Program
- The Washington Post: ICE arrests of immigrants without recorded convictions or charges
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