July saw the highest number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of President Donald Trump’s second term, with nearly 50,000 arrests throughout the month.
Trump came to office the second time around promising mass deportations, but he had to contend with a lack of infrastructure to carry these out. After months of wrangling, the Trump administration drastically expanded ICE and its funding, allowing a greater focus on arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants. This effort has begun to bear fruit, breaking the record of arrests in June, then breaking it again by a notable margin in July, according to government data provided by ICE to the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Associated Press.
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The number of ICE arrests in July was more than 5 1/2 times the number in December 2024, the last full month before Trump took office.
The data showed a steady increase over 2025, hitting a then-record of over 40,000 arrests in December. This number then plummeted in February as the administration regrouped following violent clashes with protesters in Minnesota, falling below 30,000 arrests that month.
The arrest totals stagnated until the summer, hovering around 30,000, before increasing to above 43,000 in June. July’s increase was a 15% jump from the month prior and a 70% increase from the February dip.
Texas and Florida made up a major chunk of the arrests in July, constituting about 20,000 total.
This sudden rise reflects a change in tactics, including increasingly leaning on deals with local law enforcement.
“They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective,” Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told the Associated Press.
The increase in arrests hasn’t been accompanied by as much media attention, reflecting how the agency is now shying away from the bombastic, social-media-focused strategy of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March.
Krikorian argued that the showy approach was “provoking a lot of ordinary people, turning them off even if they liked the idea of the immigration law being enforced.”
Another tactic helping to boost the arrest numbers has been the increased use of traffic stops, which have surged over the summer. Patricia Quinonez, a journalist covering the Venezuelan immigrant community in Utah for Utahzolanos, told the Associated Press that she’s observed much more rigid enforcement at traffic stops in recent months.
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“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,” she said.
The rising number of arrests and deportations has been complemented by an even higher number of self deportations, in which illegal immigrants choose to leave of their own accord. The Department of Homeland Security’s most recent figure, in December, put the total number of direct and self-deportations at 2.5 million.
