Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Trump’s second term topped 100,000 this week, as federal agents intensified efforts to detain unauthorized immigrants in courthouses, worksites and communities across the U.S., internal government data obtained by CBS News shows.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, ICE recorded more than 2,000 arrests each day, a dramatic increase from the daily average of 660 arrests reported by the agency during Mr. Trump’s first 100 days back at the White House, the federal statistics show. During President Biden last year in office, ICE averaged roughly 300 daily arrests, according to agency data.
The latest numbers show ICE is getting closer to meeting the far-reaching demands of top administration officials like White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner who has forcefully pushed the agency to conduct “a minimum” of 3,000 arrests each day.
On Thursday morning, ICE was holding around 54,000 immigrant detainees in detention facilities across the country, according to the data. The Trump administration is asking Congress to give ICE billions of dollars in extra funds to hire thousands of additional deportation officers and expand detention capacity to hold 100,000 individuals at any given point. Officials are also looking at converting facilities inside military bases into immigration detention centers.
The marked increase in ICE arrests across the country — especially in major Democratic-led cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration officials — comes after the Trump administration replaced two of the agency’s top leaders amid internal frustrations that arrests numbers were not high enough.
CBS News reached out to the representatives for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Trump administration officials have framed the aggressive expansion of immigration operations as necessary to fulfill the president’s signature campaign promises of cracking down on illegal immigration, expelling immigrants with criminal histories and overseeing the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history.
But to boost arrest numbers, ICE has resorted to more aggressive — and controversial — tactics that have triggered outrage and even confrontations in some communities.
Those efforts include arrests of migrants and asylum-seekers showing up to court hearings or check-in appointments that the government instructed them to attend. Immigration lawyers have strongly denounced those arrests, saying they deter migrants from complying with the legal process. Immigration roundups at some worksites have also been reported recently.
Videos of some ICE arrests have depicted sobbing women and children being escorted into vehicles outside of immigration courts. Footage has also captured community members confronting federal agents — some of them masked — as they take migrants into custody. One video showed construction workers suspected of being in the U.S. illegally lined up after an ICE-led operation on their worksite in Florida.
And while ICE has been arresting many immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and also have criminal records, the agency is simultaneously detaining non-criminal migrants living in the U.S. without proper documents — including longstanding residents — amid the Trump administration’s pressure to increase arrest levels.
Among them is Marcelo Gomes, an 18-year-old Brazilian-born high school student in Milford, Massachusetts, who was arrested by ICE last week on his way to volleyball practice. While ICE has acknowledged that agents were looking for his father when they arrested Gomes, it has kept the teenager in detention, saying he’s in the U.S. illegally. Gomes’ lawyer said her client initially lived in the U.S. on a temporary visa that had since lapsed.
Before Mr. Trump took office, someone like Gomes would likely not have been arrested by ICE, given his age, his lack of any criminal record and the fact that he came to the U.S. as a child over a decade ago.
But the Trump administration has reversed Biden-era restrictions on ICE operations that directed the agency to largely focus on detaining serious criminals, recent arrivals and national security threats, like suspected terrorists.
While ICE employees have spearheaded Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, the agency is receiving support from other federal agencies as part of an unprecedented effort by the administration to muster manpower and resources from across the government for immigration enforcement.
The federal agencies now helping ICE arrest unauthorized immigrants include Customs and Border Protection; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Internal Revenue Service. The Trump administration has also enlisted local and state law enforcement officials in friendly jurisdictions like Florida to support ICE operations.
