A new analysis in the New York Times details how the Trump administration has surged immigration arrests nationwide since the president took office in January, as federal authorities intensify their operations to meet Trump’s mass deportation goals. Working from government information obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley, the Times reveals that daily arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have doubled, rising from an average of less than 300 a day last year to roughly 666 today.
The numbers also show a sharp uptick shortly after White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller met with ICE officials on May 21st, where he reportedly set a target of 3,000 arrests per day. Since then, the average has effectively doubled again from that new and relative stable 666-arrests plateau, increasing sharply at the start of June and reaching 1,100 daily arrests for the first ten days of the month.
Most of the detainments occurred in states that already had high rates of enforcement, like Florida and Texas, which saw 219-percent and 92-percent increases in their average daily arrests respectively since Trump took office. After the sharp rise resulting from Miller’s meeting with ICE officials, Texas recorded a daily average of 250 daily arrests for the beginning of June, while Florida reached a new peak of 120. The two states lead the country in total ICE arrests since Trump took office, as the data shows 20,150 in Texas and 9,080 in Florida. The next closest state is California with 5,860 ICE arrests.
New York has seen a 79-percent increase in immigration arrests over 2024, with ICE arresting 2,810 since the start of the second Trump administration. The post-Miller-meeting spike sent a daily average hovering around 20 arrests to over 60 for the first ten days of June. Over forty percent of New Yorkers are immigrants, and around 50 percent live in mixed-status households.
On June 15th, President Trump announced on social media that he was going to expand deportation efforts in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, claiming that Democratic leaders in those cities were taking in undocumented migrants in order to “use them to vote,” an oft-repeated claim on the American right that has no basis in fact. Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised to “kick the fascist ICE out of New York City,” to which Trump’s so-called “border czar” Tom Homan responded that he would “double down and triple down” ICE’s operations in the city. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams has largely cooperated with the federal government’s efforts, seeking to reopen the ICE office on Rikers Island, which was closed under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
