ICE Arrests Statistics in US 2026 | Monthly Data & Key Numbers

What Is ICE and What Do ICE Arrests Mean in 2026

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created in 2003 following the dissolution of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). ICE is divided into two primary operational divisions: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which handles transnational crime, trafficking, and financial crime, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which is responsible for identifying, arresting, detaining, and deporting non-citizens in the United States who are subject to removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). An ICE arrest — formally called an “administrative arrest” — occurs when an ERO officer takes a non-citizen into custody for alleged violations of civil immigration law. Unlike criminal arrests, immigration arrests do not require a criminal warrant, do not guarantee the right to a government-appointed attorney, and place the arrested individual in the civil immigration detention system — a parallel system to the criminal justice infrastructure that has been expanding at extraordinary speed since January 20, 2025. ICE operates separately from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which handles arrests at or near the physical border; ICE’s primary mandate is interior enforcement — finding, arresting, and removing people already living in the United States.

In 2026, ICE interior enforcement is operating at a historically unprecedented scale and intensity that has no close parallel in the modern era of US immigration law. Since Trump’s second-term inauguration on January 20, 2025, ICE has arrested more than 460,000 individuals — a pace that, if sustained through the end of FY2026, would make this the most intensive interior immigration enforcement campaign in US history, measured by per-capita interior arrests. On any given day in January 2026, approximately 70,766 people were held in 225 ICE detention facilities across the country — the highest detained population in US history and the first time ICE detention crossed the 70,000 threshold. ICE has been staffed up by 120% during Trump’s second term, with thousands of additional agents, Border Patrol personnel temporarily redeployed to interior enforcement, and new authority to conduct worksite raids, courthouse arrests, and “at-large” community arrests — street-level operations that had been functionally discontinued for nearly two decades under Democratic administrations. Every major statistic in this domain points to a system that has been structurally reconfigured in less than 14 months, with consequences that are still unfolding in real time as of March 2026.

Interesting ICE Arrest Facts in the US 2026

Source: TRAC Reports / tracreports.org (updated February 2026), Austin Kocher / Substack ICE detention tracker (January 8 and February 2, 2026), American Immigration Council — “ICE’s Expanding and Increasingly Unaccountable Detention System” (February 4, 2026), FactCheck.org — “As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record” (January 28, 2026), Cato Institute / David Bier — “5% of ICE Detainees Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (November 26, 2025), Statista ICE Detainee Chart (official ICE data, 2026), Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley / UCLA), USAFacts ICE Data Analysis (January 29, 2026)

The single most significant ICE data point of 2026 is not the headline arrest total — it is the structural shift in who is being arrested. The Trump administration’s stated policy is targeting the “worst of the worst” — Secretary Kristi Noem said at a press conference in July 2025: “The individuals that we are going after are those that are violent criminals, those that are breaking our laws and those that have final removal orders.” The verified data from multiple independent sources — including the Cato Institute’s analysis of non-public ICE data leaked to them — tells a different story. 73% of people booked into ICE custody in FY2026 had no criminal conviction. Only 5% had a violent criminal conviction. And the Cato Institute’s David Bier specified in a January 22, 2026 radio interview that even that 5% figure includes “very minor assaults — someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.”

The 2,450% increase in non-criminal detainees — from 945 non-criminal detainees from ICE interior arrests on January 26, 2025 to 24,644 by January 7, 2026 — is confirmed by three independent analyses: the American Immigration Council’s February 2026 report, Austin Kocher’s January 2026 analysis of official ICE biweekly detention spreadsheets (cited by the Wall Street Journal editorial board), and FactCheck.org’s analysis of Deportation Data Project FOIA data. All three reach the same fundamental conclusion: while total ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, criminal arrests have plateaued since approximately March–August 2025. Every unit of detention growth since then has been driven almost entirely by people without criminal convictions — a pattern that directly contradicts the administration’s public justification for the enforcement surge.

ICE Monthly Arrest & Detention Statistics in 2026

Source: TRAC Reports (tracreports.org, updated February 2026), Austin Kocher Substack detention tracker (January 8 and February 2, 2026), FactCheck.org (January 28, 2026), American Immigration Council (February 4, 2026), Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley/UCLA), Prison Policy Initiative (December 11, 2025), New York Times internal ICE document analysis cited by FlowingData (March 23, 2026)

The monthly trajectory reveals an enforcement campaign that accelerated in waves — each driven by a distinct policy trigger — rather than a steady linear buildup. The first wave came immediately at inauguration on January 20, 2025: executive orders eliminating prosecutorial discretion, reinstating Remain in Mexico, and mandating the “maximum use of all available legal authorities” for enforcement produced an immediate spike in arrests in the first 30 days. The second wave came in late May 2025 when, according to the Prison Policy Initiative’s December 2025 analysis of Deportation Data Project data, White House staff specifically pressured ICE to escalate community raids toward a target of 3,000 arrests per day — producing another sharp increase in at-large arrests visible in the 14-day rolling average data. The third and most structurally significant wave was the October 2025 FY2026 beginning, when the newly enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s immigration enforcement funding unlocked new detention bed contracts and authorized expanded staffing — driving the detention population from 59,762 on September 21, 2025 to 70,766 by January 24, 2026 in just four months.

The geographic pattern across March 2026 — documented by the New York Times’ analysis of an internal ICE document as reported by FlowingData on March 23, 2026 — shows a pronounced divergence: Los Angeles and Chicago, which were targeted early in the administration with high-profile aggressive operations, have seen arrest rates “fall steeply in recent months”. In contrast, Florida and San Antonio, which did not experience high-profile early raids, have seen “high and steadily increasing numbers of arrests” throughout 2025 and into 2026. And in areas with sanctuary policies — which limit local law enforcement cooperation with ICE — arrest rates are “flat, or up only slightly.” This geographic pattern confirms the Prison Policy Initiative’s central finding: nearly half (48%) of all ICE arrests rely on collaboration with local jails and lock-ups, meaning ICE’s arrest capacity is structurally dependent on state and local policy decisions in ways that federal enforcement cannot fully override.

ICE Detention Population Statistics in 2026

Source: Austin Kocher / Substack (January 8 and February 2 and January 31, 2026), American Immigration Council (February 4, 2026), TRAC Reports (tracreports.org, February 2026), FactCheck.org (January 28, 2026), Cato Institute — David Bier (November 26, 2025), Statista ICE detention chart (official ICE data), The World Data — ICE Detainee Statistics 2026 (February 9, 2026), Wall Street Journal (January 27, 2026 — citing Austin Kocher)

The detention population data contains what is arguably the most analytically significant immigration statistic of 2025–2026: 92% of ICE detention growth between September 21, 2025 and January 7, 2026 was driven by people with no criminal convictions — a finding first published by Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher and subsequently cited verbatim by the Wall Street Journal editorial board on January 27, 2026. The math, which Kocher explained step-by-step in a January 31, 2026 transparency post, is straightforward: of the 11,296-person increase in single-day ICE detention between those two dates, only 902 were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges, and 8,121 were “other immigration violators” — people with no US criminal record whatsoever. The Trump administration has claimed that individuals listed as “other immigration violators” may have criminal records abroad, but DHS has provided no data to substantiate that claim.

The collapse of discretionary release from detention is the mechanism that has produced these record-high population numbers. Under previous administrations, individuals without violent criminal records or flight risks were routinely released on bond while awaiting immigration court hearings — often with GPS monitoring. That practice has been systematically eliminated: by November 2025, discretionary releases had fallen 87% from the start of 2025. With release no longer an option for most detainees, and with an immigration court backlog of 3.7 million cases with average processing times of 4–7 years, people are being held in detention for indeterminate periods without the prospect of a hearing date. This combination — mass arrest, no release, no hearing — is what the American Immigration Council described in their February 4, 2026 report as creating a system now “on track to rival the entire federal criminal prison system by the end of President Trump’s second term.” The 135,000-bed funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes that trajectory the government’s own official plan.

ICE Arrest Criminal Record Statistics in 2026

Source: Cato Institute / David Bier — “5% of ICE Detainees Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (November 26, 2025), FactCheck.org — “As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record” (January 28, 2026), Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley Law School / UCLA, FOIA-obtained individual-level arrest data), ICE official public detention statistics (published on ICE.gov, analyzed by multiple independent researchers)

The criminal record data is the most politically contested dimension of ICE enforcement statistics in 2026, and it requires careful attention to which population is being measured and over what time window. The Trump administration’s “70% have criminal charges or convictions” figure refers to arrests during the full first year of the term, combining both criminal convictions and pending criminal charges, using a broad definition. The Cato Institute’s analysis — using non-public data leaked to it — covers book-ins in FY2026 (since October 1, 2025) and finds that 73% had no criminal conviction and only 5% had violent criminal convictions. FactCheck.org’s analysis of Deportation Data Project FOIA data — covering January 20 to October 15, 2025 — found that 36.5% had prior criminal convictions and 29.8% had pending charges, with about one-third having neither. These figures are not mutually exclusive: they measure different time windows, different populations (arrests vs. detention book-ins), and use different definitions of “criminal.” All sources, however, agree on the directional trend: over the course of 2025, as ICE exhausted the readily available pool of people with serious criminal records, it arrested an increasingly high proportion of people without any US criminal history.

The trend line in FactCheck.org’s confirmed ICE data is unambiguous: the percentage of ICE-arrested detainees with no convictions or pending charges went from 14.7% in February 2025 to 34.6% in September 2025 to 42.7% in January 2026 — a consistent and accelerating trend toward detaining people without any US criminal record. The Cato Institute’s David Bier, director of immigration studies and the analyst who reviewed the non-public leaked ICE data, stated in a radio interview on January 22, 2026: the violent crime convictions that exist in the detained population include “very minor assaults — someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.” The administration has not released data on foreign criminal records that it cites as a possible explanation for the “other immigration violator” category, and as of March 2026, no independent analysis has been able to verify or quantify that claim.

ICE Arrests by Geography & Operation in 2026

Source: New York Times internal ICE document analysis, cited by FlowingData (March 23, 2026), TRAC Reports / tracreports.org (February 2026), Prison Policy Initiative (December 11, 2025), American Immigration Council (February 4, 2026), The World Data — ICE Detainee Statistics (February 9, 2026), Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley/UCLA)

The geographic data published March 23, 2026 — the most recent ICE enforcement geography analysis available — comes from a New York Times analysis of an internal ICE document obtained by reporters Albert Sun, Allison McCann, and Hamed Aleaziz, who processed arrest data over time to map which cities and regions were experiencing high, flat, or declining arrest rates. The findings are counterintuitive in important ways: the cities most associated with aggressive early ICE operations — Los Angeles and Chicago — are now showing steep declines in arrest rates, consistent with the pattern that visible enforcement surges exhaust the readily available target population and then taper. Cities like Florida and San Antonio, which were not early focal points of high-profile operations, are showing steady and growing arrest rates as enforcement resources spread geographically. The sanctuary jurisdiction effect — flat or slightly elevated rates in areas where local law enforcement limits cooperation with ICE — confirms the central finding of the Prison Policy Initiative’s December 2025 analysis: nearly half of all ICE arrests depend on collaboration with local jails and lock-ups, making state and local policy the single most powerful variable determining local enforcement intensity.

The 1,100% surge in at-large community arrests — documented by the Deportation Data Project using FOIA-obtained individual-level arrest data — represents perhaps the most consequential operational shift in ICE’s enforcement methodology in the modern era. For roughly two decades before 2025, at-large arrests were functionally discontinued: ICE focused overwhelmingly on arresting people at jails and prisons when they completed criminal sentences, a practice that minimized collateral civic disruption and concentrated enforcement on those with verified criminal records. The Trump administration’s restoration and dramatic escalation of at-large arrest operations — including worksite raids at farms, construction sites, factories, and other businesses, arrests at immigration courthouses (people who voluntarily appeared for scheduled hearings), and arrests at ICE check-ins (people complying with existing supervision requirements) — has fundamentally changed the risk profile facing every undocumented person in the United States. As the Deportation Data Project’s analysis notes, these at-large arrests principally target Latino communities, as documented by journalists, advocates, and human rights observers across multiple cities.

ICE Removals & Deportation Statistics in 2026

Source: TRAC Reports / tracreports.org — “Taking Stock: Trump Administration Record on Detention and Removals” (November 2025, updated with FY2026 data), Deportation Data Project — “Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months of the Second Trump Administration” (UC Berkeley / UCLA), Cato Institute / David Bier (November 26, 2025), American Immigration Council (February 4, 2026)

The removal data provides the most important check on the Trump administration’s stated mass deportation objectives. The administration has set a goal of 1 million deportations per year — a figure that would represent roughly a 4x increase over the pace of the most intensive prior deportation eras. The data from TRAC Reports — the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, a nonpartisan data research organization that has tracked immigration enforcement since 1989 — shows that total Trump administration removals through approximately November 2025 were only 7% higher than Biden’s last full year (FY2024). The Deportation Data Project’s more granular analysis of individual-level FOIA-obtained data finds that interior deportations following ICE arrest have increased 4.6x over the prior baseline — a very significant increase — but when annualized, the current pace projects to under 300,000 interior deportations per year, less than one-third of the stated 1 million goal.

This gap between stated objective and measured outcome is not evidence of policy failure per se — it reflects the structural constraints on any deportation program: immigration court backlogs of 3.7 million cases with 4–7 year average wait times, capacity limitations in the deportation flight infrastructure, diplomatic constraints on receiving countries, and the legal challenges that have blocked deportation of certain populations (most notably TPS holders and DACA recipients). The +21x increase in voluntary departures — people leaving the US without being formally removed after being arrested or deterred by enforcement — suggests that some portion of the deterrence goal is being achieved outside the formal removal statistics, but this is not captured in official removal counts. The Cato Institute’s finding that barely 90,000 people with criminal convictions had been removed through the full Trump enforcement campaign to November 2025 is perhaps the sharpest data point contradicting the administration’s narrative: it represents an average of fewer than 300 criminal deportees per day over the entire first year of the most intensive immigration enforcement campaign in US history.

ICE Enforcement: Impact on US Communities in 2026

Source: American Immigration Council (February 4, 2026), The World Data (February 9, 2026), Austin Kocher / Substack (February 2, 2026), Deportation Data Project (UC Berkeley/UCLA), Human Rights Watch “US: ICE Abuses in Los Angeles Set Stage for Other Cities” (2025)

The community-level impact data captures dimensions of the ICE enforcement surge that the arrest and detention numbers alone cannot convey. The American Immigration Council’s February 4, 2026 comprehensive detention report — the most detailed independent assessment of the entire ICE detention system published in this enforcement period — documents a cascade of institutional failures that have accompanied the system’s rapid expansion: ICE’s detainee locator system has become unreliable, causing people to “disappear” for days in the system; access to phones in detention is uncertain; medical care is “worsening and substandard”; and documented violations of ICE’s own detention standards have become routine rather than exceptional. The report is explicit in its conclusion: “2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record, and 2026 is looking to be worse.” The January 2026 alone — with what AIC calls a “shocking number of deaths” — represents a mortality rate in civil immigration detention that advocacy organizations have framed as a public health crisis inside the federal government’s own facilities.

The rescission of the “sensitive locations” policy — which had previously barred ICE arrests at or near schools, hospitals, places of worship, and similar community institutions — has fundamentally changed the social geography of enforcement. Under prior administrations, immigrants could access emergency healthcare, drop children at school, or attend religious services without fear of arrest at those locations. That protection no longer exists. The courthouse arrest policy — deploying plain-clothes federal agents to arrest people who voluntarily appeared for scheduled immigration hearings — has had a particularly acute chilling effect on legal compliance: immigration lawyers and advocates across the country have reported sharp declines in hearing attendance and voluntary reporting, as individuals calculate that appearing before a judge increases rather than decreases their arrest risk. The consequence, as the Deportation Data Project notes, is a civil immigration system in which due process is functionally unavailable for a growing share of those subject to enforcement — and in which the gap between the constitutional protections that nominally apply and those that are practically accessible has never been wider.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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