Read report as a PDF Introduction The story of immigration enforcement in the first year of the second Trump administration is a story of a drastic increase in interior immigration enforcement: enforcement that occurs within the United States, usually far from the border. Interior deportations surged to more than four and a half times their pre-inauguration level (see Figure 1).1 The steep increase in ICE deportations reflects two other large-scale changes. First, ICE began making more arrests of people without criminal convictions and more arrests at large in communities.2 For the two decades before 2025, ICE made very few such street arrests. Instead, ICE relied on transfers from jails and prisons for its interior enforcement. In 2025, the number of street arrests went up by 11 times (see Figure 3). Meanwhile, the number of transfers3 doubled, partly because ICE arrested more people without criminal convictions or with convictions for minor crimes. 3 ICE refers to these transfers from jails and prisons as arrests. This recent piece offers an account of the large rise in at-large arrests.4 A recent report from the American Immigration Council documents similar trends with different emphases (and often more detail).Second, ICE increased the number of deportations following arrests by detaining more people and releasing fewer once detained.4 ICE roughly tripled the number of detention beds used for interior enforcement (see Figure 7). It did so not only by spending more money on detention, but also because of a decline in arrivals at the border. That trend, which mostly occurred in the last year of the Biden administration (see sidebar figure), freed up detention beds for people arrested within the United States. At the same time, as the administration increased the use of detention, detention has begun to lead to removal more often, with the chance of deportation within 60 days of detention increasing from 55 percent to just over 69 percent, a 25 percent relative increase. As the release rate decreased, the number of voluntary departures increased by more than 21 times. 100k 200k 2023 2024 2025 Date of arrest Monthly arrests Border Patrol Arrests The increase in detention space and immigrants’ decisions not to fight their cases from detention help explain why, even as ICE arrested people who would be more likely to win their cases, such as those without any criminal convictions, the deportation rate among arrestees shot up. Despite the scale of these trends, the administration is not close to its goal of deporting one million people a year if that goal refers to interior deportations. At the most recent rate for which we have data (September/October 2025), the government would deport under 300,000 people this year.5 That number would be unprecedented in this century, but not close to the administration’s target. 5 In order to be confident that our measure is comparable over time, we make conservative decisions in determining which deportations are interior deportations, and it is possible that we underestimate the total number by up to 10-15%. If so, that would not change this qualitative conclusion.In this report, we document these two patterns using individual-level data on arrests and detentions obtained from ICE through litigation over a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, which was represented by Deportation Data Project attorneys. We draw on data from the second half of 2024 through October 15, 2025. We posted these datasets on the project website in December, promptly after receiving them from ICE. Interior Deportations Increased by Four and a Half Times We know of no reliable count of the total number of deportations during the first year of the Trump administration.6 Instead of producing a total count, we focus on a key trend: the number of deportations over time following an ICE arrest and detention.7 Figure 1 shows deportations following ICE arrest and detention over time.8 The number more than quadrupled:9 there were 4.6 times as many deportations following ICE arrest and detention in the last month of the data (September 15 – October 14, 2025) as during the average month in the second half of 2024. 6 ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) both produce datasets on removals, but they likely overlap to some degree, and since they are not connected, we have not developed a reliable way to estimate the size of the overlap. Austin Kocher has offered a detailed discussion of these issues.7 To be more precise, we include only individuals who had an ICE arrest around the date of their book-in to ICE detention, and who were booked out of ICE detention for removal. We do not use ICE’s removals dataset both because we have doubts about its reliability and because we believe this is a meaningful measure of interior deportations over time.8 We include removals, voluntary departures, and (a small number of) voluntary returns as deportations here. We consider voluntary departures separately below.9 Notice that this does not mean that the annual total number of deportations in 2025 is five times larger than in 2024. Instead, we are comparing the last month of data to the six months in the second half of 2024. Although our individual-level data does not go beyond October 15, 2025, ICE’s summary statistics suggest that it has sustained or slightly increased the number of removals since that date. Since ICE does not distinguish between interior and border removals in those statistics, however, we cannot be certain.We arrive at this estimate of the change in the number of deportations based on two key analytical choices. First, we consider only deportations that started with an arrest by ICE inside the United States. By separating interior and border enforcement, two countervailing trends emerge: the rise in interior enforcement on the one hand and decline in border enforcement on the other. The decline in arrests at the Southwest border continued a trend that began under the Biden Administration. (Notably, research by one of us demonstrates that federal border policy influences trends in immigrants’ arrivals less than commonly thought.) Second, we compare the last month of available data (mid-September to mid-October 2025) to the last half of 2024. The rate of deportations rose dramatically over the course of 2025, and so our choice leads to a comparison of recent enforcement policy with that under the final months of the Biden Administration. The rest of this report explains how such a large increase in deportations occurred, tracing that increase at least partly to changes in arrests and detention. Figure 1: Interior Deportations by ICE Increased by Four and a Half Times Biden Trump II 0 2,000 4,000 6,000 July 2024 October January 2025 April July October Date of book-out from detention for removal Weekly removals More Arrests, Especially Street Arrests The first reason the increase in deportations was possible was a quadrupling of ICE arrests resulting in detention. Figure 2 illustrates the overall trend.10 ICE started making more of the arrests it has always made – and also started making vastly more street arrests and arrest of people without criminal convictions.11 10 We focus on arrests that actually resulted in detention; it is possible for ICE to arrest a person and then decide not to book that person into detention.11 An early report of this pattern was published in the Los Angeles Times. Figure 2: ICE Arrests Resulting in Detention Quadrupled Biden Trump II 0 2,000 4,000 6,000 July 2024 October January 2025 April July October Date of book-in to detention Weekly arrests Before 2025, ICE arrests were mostly not arrests in the usual sense of the word. Instead, they were transfers of custody from jails or prisons. In such transfers, noncitizens who were initially arrested on criminal charges (typically unrelated to immigration law), are moved by ICE to immigration detention facilities, where they are held for civil violations of immigration law. In 2025, ICE quadrupled total arrests by (1) more than doubling the number of such transfers and (2) increasing arrests not in jails or prisons by more than a factor of ten. Figure 3 illustrates these two trends.12 The over tenfold increase from a low base explains why ICE street arrests seem like a new phenomenon. 12 We exclude a small number of arrests that we could not categorize as custodial or street arrests. Figure 3: Transfers from Jails and Prisons Doubled and Street Arrests Increased by 10x Biden Trump II 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 July 2024 October January 2025 April July October Date of book-in to detention Weekly arrests Custodial arrests (Transfers from jail or prison) Street Arrests The new administration has also more than doubled transfers from jails and prisons to ICE custody. Under the Biden administration, ICE often declined to transfer a person from a local jail to immigration detention if the person did not meet one of the government’s enforcement priorities – for example, if the noncitizen had not been convicted of certain crimes.13 13 The memo laying out these enforcement priorities is available here.For both transfers and street arrests, the Trump administration’s decision to stop prioritizing arrests based on factors such as criminal convictions (or to prioritize less) resulted in another well-known trend: the huge increase in the number of arrests of noncitizens not convicted of any crime. Figure 4 shows trends in arrests by criminal conviction. Comparing the month before the inauguration to the last month in the data, arrests of people without convictions went up by seven times; arrests of people with nonviolent convictions doubled, and arrests of people with convictions for violent crimes increased by roughly 30%.14 14 CBS News published an early analysis of the crimes noncitizens were charged with in the first months of the new administration. Figure 4: Arrests of Noncitizens Without Criminal Convictions Up 7x Biden Trump II 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 July 2024 October January 2025 April July October Date of book-in to detention Weekly arrests Convictions None Nonviolent crime Violent crime The change in targeted affected both street arrests and transfers from jails and prisons. Figure 5 illustrates both, and highlights that the trend is more pronounced among street arrests.15 15 Note that the numbers in the left and right panels of Figure 5 don’t quite add up to the number in Figure 2 because we are unsure how to categorize some ICE arrests. Figure 5: Arrests of Noncitizens without Criminal Convictions Increased among Street Arrests and Also Among Transfers from Jails Biden Trump II Biden Trump II Custodial arrests (Transfers from jail or prison) Non-custodial arrest (Street arrests, worksite raids) Jul. 2024 Oct. Jan. 2025 Apr. Jul. Oct. Jul. 2024 Oct. Jan. 2025 Apr. Jul. Oct. 0 1,000 2,000 3,000 Week of book-in to detention Weekly arrests Convictions None Nonviolent crime Violent crime More Detentions, Fewer Releases Deportations increased not only because more people were arrested but also because, first, ICE had more space to hold them, and second, the government changed the rules to prevent detainees from being released while fighting their cases. The number of daily detention beds holding people arrested in the interior of the United States more than tripled over the course of 2025, increasing from a daily average of around 13,000 in the second half of 2024 to over 43,000 in the last month of data (mid-September to mid-October 2025). This was possible for two reasons. First, as widely reported, the total number of detention beds increased from around 40,000 in January 2025 to over 60,000 in October 2025,16 in large part because ICE received a huge infusion of cash from the One Big Beautiful Bill. Figure 6 shows that those resources mostly resulted in more people being held in existing facilities; new facilities accounted for only about a third of the increase. 16 ICE Detention Management spreadsheets. Figure 6: Increase in ICE Detention Largely Comes from Expanding Use of Existing Facilities, One Third of Increase Comes from New Facilities Trump II 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 January 2025 April July October Date of book-in to detention Weekly detainees Not used before 2025 Used before 2025 Less well known is that the huge increase in detention was also possible because arrests at the border declined. Figure 7 shows these countervailing trends. As arrests at the border fell – both because fewer people were trying to cross the border and because the new administration began expelling nearly everyone who did – there was more space in detention for people arrested with the United States. ICE rapidly filled that space. A key note here is that the decrease in arrivals at the border mostly took place during the last year of the Biden administration. As one of us has explained in other work, it is incorrect to suggest that the Trump administration is mostly responsible for the decline in arrivals, and there are reasons to believe that deterrence efforts at the border are less effective than commonly believed. Figure 7: ICE Detention Bed Space Opened by Decreasing Border Arrests Filled by Arrestees from the Interior Biden Trump II 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 July 2024 October January 2025 April July October Date of book-in to detention Average overnight detainees by week Arrest in the interior Arrest near border Finally, the administration did not just increase the number of people in detention, it also made it harder for them to be released. Before this administration, ICE often released people from detention who were reasonably likely to win their case, and if ICE didn’t release them itself, an immigration judge often granted them release on bond. Both decisions were in the hands of the presidential administration.17 17 Unlike other federal judges, immigration judges are administrative judges who are employed by the Department of Justice and are bound by guidance from the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals, also a part of the Department of Justice.18 According to one count, there are now more than 100 lawsuits filed daily–but there are close to 1000 ICE arrests per day.ICE now releases virtually no one before a final deportation decision, and the administration has also made it far more difficult for immigration judges to release people by granting bond. On July 8, ICE issued guidance suggesting that anyone who had entered the country without inspection (i.e. between ports of entry) was ineligible for bond, regardless of how long they had lived in the United States. On September 5, the Board of Immigration Appeals reached the same conclusion in a decision that bound immigration judges. Despite hundreds of judicial opinions finding the policy illegal, ICE and immigration courts continue to apply it. One result has been a flood of habeas corpus petitions