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US immigration enforcement officials arrested more people in the first 22 days of February 2025 than in any month over the last seven years, according to a Guardian review of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data.
The Guardian review, which analyzed DHS data from the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency, in addition to interviews with immigration lawyers, advocates and former Ice officials, show how the administration has transformed immigration enforcement in the US within just a few weeks.
In a rush to meet Trump’s goal of “mass deportations”, the administration has moved to quickly close the US southern border – suspending the asylum program and other Biden-era programs that offered humanitarian relief. Simultaneously, it has amped up immigration enforcement in the interior of the country.
Immigration officials are not only arresting more people, but also placing increasing numbers in detention. DHS announced Tuesday that immigration detention had been filled to capacity, with 47,600 detainees.
The Guardian analysis also reveals that while the administration says it has been targeting “criminals”, Ice enforcement instead has become more indiscriminate. And it shows that as the administration tries to ramp up arrests, it is reshaping the relationship between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement.
“What we’re seeing is a real scattershot of different tactics,” said Gracie Willis, a rapid response attorney at the National Immigration Project, a membership organization for attorneys and immigration advocates.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have enacted harsh immigration policies, Willis added. But the Biden administration had at least made clear which immigrants it was prioritizing for detention and removal, she argued. “We had an idea of which clients might be at risk,” she said. “Now, I think there’s this lack of predictability.”
Indiscriminate enforcement
Immigration agents made a huge show of force within the first weeks of the Trump administration, staging flashy televised raids, purportedly in pursuit of criminals and gang members.
Ice highlighted images of its agents in bulletproof vests, alongside their counterparts from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the US marshals, descending on apartment complexes in search of members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In daily social media posts during the first days of the new administration, Ice shared the names and images of alleged criminals and fugitives they had arrested.
But the administration’s policies and arrest data over the past month reveal a different focus.
One of Trump’s first actions as president was to roll back a Biden-era memo that directed Ice enforcement agents to prioritize the arrests of people who posed threats to national security and public safety. Instead, the Trump administration made clear that it considers anyone who is in the US without a legal status subject to arrest and removal.
Between 12 January and 9 February, the number of immigrants detained by Ice who had no criminal conviction or pending criminal charge saw a 221% increase, according to an analysis by the political and legal geographer Austin Kocher.
In November 2024, people without criminal convictions made up about 6% of people in Ice detention, according to federal data. By February 2024, that number went up to 16%.
“It’s absolutely the case that Ice enforcement appears to be becoming more indiscriminate,” said David Hausman, assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school. “First, we know they’re trying to maximize the number of arrests each day, which means they can’t be as thoughtful about what they’re doing. And second, they explicitly have the goal of spreading fear among immigrants in the United States, and indiscriminate arrests accomplish that as well.”
“If your goal is to increase the number of deportations, you can’t hit big numbers of removals without focusing on the non-criminal population,” said John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of Ice during the Obama administration.
It’s not that the previous administration didn’t arrest and deport immigrants without criminal histories. But the Trump administration has reoriented the agency’s enforcement strategy in order to meet the president’s zeal to speed deportations, Sandweg said.
“There are some bad guys in this country,” he said. “But getting them requires more traditional detective work … going out and building informants in communities, finding out who’s preying on the immigrant communities and getting people in those communities to cooperate, talk and share information.” It can take hundreds of hours of work to book just one person accused of serious crimes or gang-related charges, he said, whereas indiscriminately arresting anyone without legal status is quick.
Granular data on who the Trump administration is arresting is harder to come by than detention data. DHS’s office of homeland security statistics publishes detailed arrest data for Ice, breaking down the number of arrests by criminal history. But the data from OHSS hasn’t been updated since November 2024. Between October 2022 and November 2024, 78% of people arrested by the agency had a misdemeanor conviction or no conviction at all.
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In some cases, it’s likely that agents were seeking addresses where immigrants with either criminal histories or removal orders had resided, said Veronica Cardenas, an immigration attorney and former assistant chief counsel to Ice. But if the targeted person or people aren’t home, or have moved out, agents may still try to check the immigration status of whoever is there, and arrest them if they’re undocumented.
“One of my clients told me that he lives in a home where the former resident of that apartment had an order of removal,” Cardenas said. “That’s bad, because if they go looking for that former resident, because he still gets mail there, they’re going to find my client. And they could have the authority to detain them.”
Immigration advocates are also increasingly concerned that clients who have been placed under electronic monitoring, including phone apps and ankle monitors, will be at risk for arrest or removal orders. It is still unclear to what extent the federal government is currently targeting immigrants using electronic surveillance systems, but lawyers and advocacy groups have reported that some have been called into detention or issued removal orders in recent weeks
“These are not people who have had any kind of a status change,” said Willis, of the National Immigration Project. “These aren’t people who are doing harm in their communities. They are complying with what is required of them.” But because the government knows exactly who they are, and where they are, said Willis – they could be especially vulnerable to immigration enforcement.
A new relationship with law enforcement
As the administration tries to ramp up arrests, it is also reshaping the relationship between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement. Since Trump took office, the Trump administration has approved more than 226 new agreements under the 287(g) program, which allows state and local law enforcement officers to collaborate with the federal government to enforce immigration laws.
By contrast, there were no new agreements finalized under the program made from December 2020 and February 2025, including through the duration of the Biden administration.
The 287(g) agreements have allowed local law enforcement to identify and process people who have been arrested, and allowed Ice to train local officers to service Ice administrative warrants. A third type of 287(g) agreement, called the taskforce model, granted local law enforcement agencies many of the same powers as Ice agents – but it was discontinued in January 2013 after an Ice policy memo found them to be less effective. Advocates have pointed out that these programs especially encourage racial profiling by local law enforcement – encouraging officers to scrutinize anyone who may look like an immigrant.
The Trump administration, however, is trying to bring them back, describing these programs as a “force multiplier”. Of the 226 new memorandums of understanding (MOUs) signed in 2025, 141 have been for new taskforce 287(g) programs.
These new agreements could increase policing in immigrant communities that are already seeing huge disruptions to their daily lives as Ice and other federal agents increasingly patrol neighborhoods and residential areas.
“Too often, immigrant communities are targeted by Ice because of what they look like, the same way the policing system criminalizes people of color,” said Laura Rivera, a senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law, an immigration legal firm. “And increasingly, the agency seems to be targeting people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
