ICE Traded Raids for Traffic Stops. Arrests Hit a Record Anyway
This administration did it again. It snuck something past us that they hoped we wouldn’t notice. They did this by not showcasing National Guard convoys rolling into a downtown, or a cabinet secretary in a tactical vest posing for cameras, or being blatant enough to trigger a week of protests dominating cable news. But make no mistake of the severity of this administration’s latest brag — July was the biggest month for immigration arrests since President Trump returned to office, according to government data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by the Associated Press. The count came to 49,571 people, roughly 1,600 a day, according to NPR’s reading of the same data.
We only know this number because a university project sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act and won. The Department of Homeland Security largely stopped publishing its own enforcement statistics at the start of this term. So the most aggressive month of a policy affecting millions of households arrived without a press release.
The trend line matters more than any single month. Arrests were a little over 8,000 in the month before Trump took office, according to the AP, then climbed past 40,000 by December. After two fatal shootings by federal agents during the Minneapolis surge in January, the numbers dropped to about 29,000 in February. They sat there through the spring. Then they took off again, up 15 percent from June to July and 70 percent from February, according to the AP. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told senators at his confirmation hearing that he wanted ICE out of the headlines. He delivered on that half. The tactic simply got quieter, not smaller.
Quieter looks like this. Instead of raids that draw crowds, agents are making arrests at traffic stops, at airports, at immigration court hearings and at the routine check-ins that immigrants are required to attend, according to CBS News. Two men were killed by federal agents during attempted traffic stops in Maine and Texas this summer. The visible crackdown gave way to something more diffuse and harder to organize against, and the data suggests that was the point.
So who is getting picked up? The administration keeps saying the worst of the worst. According to the CBS News analysis, July was the first month this term when people with only civil immigration violations, no charges and no convictions, made up more than half of those arrested, averaging more than 800 such arrests a day. People with convictions for violent crimes were about 4 percent of July’s total. A DHS spokesperson told CBS that many people counted as noncriminals are actually gang members or human rights abusers without a rap sheet in this country. That may be true of some. But the agency has not released the data that would let anyone check, and CBS asked.
The engine behind this is local. Texas and Florida alone accounted for nearly 20,000 of July’s arrests, according to the AP, and both lean heavily on 287(g) agreements that let county deputies act as immigration officers. ICE now has more than 1,850 such agreements and has set aside $1.15 billion to grow the program through September 2027, according to CBS News.
We can support border security and still ask a simple question. If this is working as intended, why does it take a lawsuit to see the numbers? Congress handed ICE billions with no transparency strings attached. The next data release should come from the agency, on a schedule, without a court order. Until it does, we are being asked to trust a system that has decided we do not need to know. We should always…Go beyond the headlines…
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