ICE Made Nearly 50,000 Arrests in July, and for the First Time Most Had No Criminal Record

Since ICE arrest totals began surging again in June after the Minneapolis fallout, the numbers have kept climbing. July data now shows 49,571 arrests, the highest single month of Trump's second term, according to figures ICE provided to the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by the Associated Press.

That's a 15% jump from June's 43,021 arrests and a 70% increase from February's 29,241, when arrests bottomed out after the fatal Minneapolis shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked protests, a leadership shake-up at DHS, and the departure of Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and then-Secretary Kristi Noem.

The bigger shift is who's getting picked up. CBS News reports that July was the first month of Trump's second term when people with only civil immigration violations, not pending criminal charges or convictions, made up more than half of those arrested. The Guardian's own analysis of the same dataset puts that figure at 51%. People with violent-crime convictions, as defined by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, account for about 4% of July arrests and roughly 6% of everyone currently in ICE detention.

DHS doesn't dispute the numbers. A DHS spokesperson told CBS News that "ICE enforces the law as written. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is whether or not they are illegally in the U.S. — full stop," adding that many people counted as "non-criminals" are "actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S." DHS did not provide data to CBS News backing that specific claim when asked.

The tactics have changed, not the target

Last year's enforcement wave was built around visible operations: armed agents in battle fatigues marching through Los Angeles parks, raids on Chicago apartment buildings. That approach cratered in the polls after Minneapolis. What's replaced it, according to the Guardian and inewsource, is quieter and more dispersed. Agents pull over one car instead of ten officers swarming one address. Arrests happen at scheduled ICE check-ins, at airports, and outside people's homes.

"The way that people are being detained is far less flashy, but we are still continuing to see arrests," Melissa Shepard, director of legal services at ImmDef in Southern California, told the Guardian. "It's just on a quieter scale."

San Diego and Imperial counties illustrate the trend at the local level. inewsource reports ICE arrested nearly 2,000 people there in July, up 50% from June and the highest total of Trump's second term for that region. About 60% of those arrested had no criminal convictions or pending charges. In one widely circulated incident in City Heights, San Diego police were called in after a 1-year-old girl was left in a car following an apparent immigration operation. A police lieutenant said officers were there to "keep the peace," not assist with enforcement.

Where the growth is coming from

Texas and Florida together accounted for nearly 20,000 of July's arrests, according to PBS and the Associated Press, driven largely by 287(g) agreements that deputize local and state police to act as ICE's arms. Breitbart reports the number of agencies enrolled in 287(g) has grown from 135 at the start of Trump's second term to more than 1,400 today, and that local law enforcement assisted in roughly 6,500 arrests in July, or 13% of the total, up from 5% a year earlier.

Fox News separately reported on a two-week operation in the D.C. suburbs, "Operation Safe Community — Washington, D.C.," that ran August 1-14 and led to 1,328 arrests in Virginia and Maryland. Of those, Fox News says almost 400 had criminal convictions or pending charges, including a Salvadoran national wanted on a murder warrant and members of MS-13, Tren de Aragua and the 18th Street Gang. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called it evidence that "the brave men and women of ICE are hard at work every single day getting these dangerous illegal aliens out of our country."

Mullin has said publicly he wants ICE arrests to draw less attention than they did under Noem. He's also argued that sanctuary jurisdictions bring enforcement on themselves. "I'm just saying, let's work to get the worst of the worst off the streets and then you won't see me in your cities and states like you do as much," he told a governors' conference this month.

Critics on the right argue the numbers still don't match the scale promised. Mike Howell of the Oversight Project told ABC News, as cited by Breitbart, that arrest and deportation totals "remain wildly disproportionately low to the scale of illegals let in by Biden," and said he's suing DHS for what he considers more accurate data, warning against using "inflated deportation statistics" to justify a legislative compromise. Record monthly totals sound large in isolation but are being measured against a Biden-era intake Howell and others consider far larger.

Removals hit a second-term high too, with the Guardian reporting nearly 34,000 people removed from the country in July. DHS's $70 billion funding boost from Congress last summer is fueling the ramp-up toward the administration's stated goal of 2,000 arrests a day, a target July's daily average of roughly 1,600 still falls short of. Whether the shift toward quieter, dispersed tactics can close that gap without triggering another Minneapolis-style backlash is the open question heading into the fall.