arrest number

WASHINGTON — Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 10,000 people over a five-day period at the end of June, marking a major push by the agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportations agenda.

The arrest numbers, obtained from a person familiar with the information who spoke anonymously to discuss data that has not been publicly released, comes after the agency shifted its approach from high-profile arrest sweeps in major American cities to quieter ways to reach President Trump’s deportation goals.

The figures indicate that while the administration is no longer cracking down on individual cities, the arrests continue and are surging.

The total number of arrests during the five-day period starting Friday and ending Tuesday translates to roughly 2,000 arrests per day. It was not clear where the arrests had taken place.

The spike in arrests was first reported by The New York Times.

“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,” said the Department of Homeland Security 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 arrests news also comes as the number of people entered into ICE detention facilities climbed in June to roughly 39,000 after hovering near 30,000 per month since February, according to information obtained by the Associated Press.

ICE doesn’t publicly release arrest data, making exact comparisons with previous periods difficult. But according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press, 2,000 arrests per day would mark a sharp increase over previous periods.

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 that 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 advisor 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 arrests 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.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.

At the peak of the crackdown, carloads of masked immigration officers were a common sight in the streets of Minneapolis, while thousands of people were being arrested every week in Texas, Florida and California.

“Turn and burn,” top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino called the strategy, with relentless displays of force and teams of agents descending on restaurant kitchens, bus stops and Home Depot parking lots.

In December, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents peaked at nearly 40,000 nationwide and were nearly as high the next month, according to data provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Associated Press.

In late January, the killings in Minneapolis of two American citizens by immigration officers and growing concerns over the government’s heavy-handed tactics led to a shake-up of top immigration officials. In the weeks that followed, ICE arrests across the country dropped on average by nearly 12%.

Polling has found the public felt the immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota went too far, a factor that may have contributed to the abrupt firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in early March.

The numbers don’t follow the same pattern everywhere

Bovino, who swaggered through raid scenes in tactical gear and was the public face of the Trump administration crackdown, was pushed aside following the killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Border advisor Tom Homan was then sent to the Twin Cities to chart a new course for immigration enforcement, and he announced the drawdown of immigration agents in the state on Feb. 4.

An AP analysis of ICE arrest records show the department averaged 7,369 weekly arrests nationwide in the five weeks after Homan’s drawdown announcement, , the most recent period for which data is available, down from 8,347 per week in the previous five weeks. Those arrest numbers were still higher on average than during much of the first year of President Trump’s second term, and were dramatically higher than during the Biden administration.

The numbers were not, however, uniform across the country.

ICE arrests rose significantly in Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina and Florida during those five weeks, in some cases hitting their highest weekly count since the start of Trump’s second term.. In Kentucky alone, weekly arrests more than doubled, reaching 86 by early March.

Those increases were offset by steep drops in a handful of large states, including Minnesota and Texas.

Many arrested were not Trump’s ‘worst of the worst’

The Trump administration insists it is targeting the most vicious criminals living illegally in the U.S., and the president has referred to them as “ the worst of the worst.”

In some cases the description is accurate, but the reality is complicated.

Many of the toughest criminals taken into ICE custody were already in prison, but many others who were arrested have no criminal history.

Nationally, some 46% of the people ICE arrested in the five weeks before Feb. 4 had no criminal charges or convictions, dropping to 41% in the five weeks that followed.

Yet that’s still above the 35% weekly average for the time since Trump returned to office. And in a number of states, even after Feb. 4, the share of noncriminals being arrested went up, not down.

Has there been a change in approach?

Across the country, thousands of federal court filings offer an imperfect window into how the Trump administration’s deportation tactics remain in high gear, even if activity has waned.

Like the 21-year-old Honduran man with no criminal record who has filed a petition for release after being arrested Feb. 22 in a suburban San Diego traffic stop. The father of three U.S. citizen children — ages 5, 3 and 10 months — had been under ICE surveillance, the petition says, before officers in tactical gear pulled him over.

Or the 33-year-old Venezuelan woman, a well-known south Texas doctor who worked in a region designated as medically underserved, who was arrested earlier this month with her 5-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, on her way to her husband’s asylum hearing.

She was arrested, officials said, for overstaying her visa.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the research and advocacy group the American Immigration Council, says he sees signs of change in lower arrest and detention numbers but warns it’s too early to know if those shifts are permanent.

“The Trump administration says: ‘We’re not slowing down,’ ‘Nothing has changed,’” in immigration enforcement, he said. “But it’s very clear that they have pulled back from some of the tactics of Operation Metro Surge,” the crackdown that swept Minneapolis.

Kessler and Sullivan write for the Associated Press. Kessler reported from Washington and Sullivan from Minneapolis. AP reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.