Jan. 7, 2026Updated Jan. 8, 2026, 10:09 a.m. ETThe Phoenix area may see a spike in immigration enforcement as ICE uses its increased funding to expand arrests and detention space.Federal agents conducted an enforcement action Jan. 4 at a Phoenix Home Depot, arresting two men.The Trump administration plans to expand immigration detention capacity, with Phoenix being a potential hub for removal operations.Lea la historia en españolThe Phoenix area could see a dramatic escalation in immigration enforcement and removal operations by the Trump administration in the coming months, similar to the highly visible aggressive tactics seen in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities in 2025, according to immigrant advocates and media reports.The escalation may have already started. On Jan. 4, federal agents showed up at a Home Depot in Phoenix where large numbers of day laborers typically gather and began chasing and attempting to arrest people, including at least one U.S. citizen, according to advocates and interviews with day laborers.Federal officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have carried out numerous actions at Home Depot parking lots in the Los Angeles area and other metro areas. But the action Jan. 4 was the first time federal officers have executed a similar action at a Home Depot in the Phoenix area since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 and launched a massive deportation campaign, according to immigrant advocates.The advocates expect the Home Depot action to be the first of more to come, given that ICE has received billions of dollars in additional funding to ramp up immigration enforcement and the ICE office in Phoenix is under pressure to boost immigration arrests."We believe that there's going to be more enforcement being that the agency has more resources," said Raquel Terán, acting executive director for Progress Arizona, a progressive advocacy group.In October, ICE removed John Cantu, the person in charge of immigration and removal operations in Arizona, and reassigned him to another office. The reassignment was part of a shake-up to replace ICE officials with Border Patrol agents in several cities deemed as underperforming under pressure from Trump administration officials who favor arresting as many undocumented immigrants as possible over prioritizing resources on immigrants with serious criminal backgrounds.A DHS official confirmed Jan. 7 that ICE had carried out an enforcement action at the Home Depot but said it was a targeted arrest, not a sweep.“On Jan. 4, ICE conducted a targeted immigration enforcement operation in Phoenix, Arizona, near a Home Depot that resulted in the arrest of two illegal aliens from Mexico," Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement.One of the people arrested, Juna Esquivel Moreno, is a "criminal illegal alien from Mexico who chose to commit a felony by illegally reentering the United States after being deported at least FOUR separate times," McLaughlin said.The other, Fernando Molina Mendoza, also has no legal status to remain in the United States, McLaughlin said.Both of the people arrested were in ICE custody pending removal, she said.“We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App. The United States is offering illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return."Immigrant advocates who rushed to Home Depot and arrived as people were being arrested and interviews with day laborers gave a different account. They said the action took place about 10 a.m. in the parking lot of the Home Depot on Thomas Road near 36th Street."First they approached real friendly" and then began grabbing and arresting day laborers, many of whom ran away, said Salvador Reza, an organizer with Barrio Defense Committees, a local immigrant advocacy organization.At least one day laborer managed to jerk free and run away, Reza said. ICE officers detained three people but released one after he was was able to show he was a U.S. citizen, Reza said. Two of the day laborers were taken into custody, Reza said.One of the day laborers arrested was a 60-year-old man with diabetes who has been in the U.S. for over 30 years, said Erika Andiola, political director for the National Day Labor Organizing Network."He wasn’t a target. They were basically chasing anyone who was running, and he was one of the people who was arrested and thrown to the ground," Andiola said.US citizen says he was briefly detainedVictor Manuel Sanchez, 30, a U.S. citizen, said he was briefly detained by ICE officers in the Home Depot parking lot on Jan. 4 after he initially ran away. While walking back to the spot where he was standing, he was approached by ICE officers who pulled up in an unmarked vehicle and began questioning him about where he was born and why he ran away. They also asked him if he had been drinking, Sanchez said.Sanchez said he told them he was born at a Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix and ran away because all of the other day laborers were running. He said he had not been drinking.The ICE officers told him to place his hands on the vehicle. He said he was detained for about six minutes. He said ICE officers let him leave after he pulled out his wallet and showed him his Arizona identification card.Sanchez said since he was laid off from his restaurant job in May, he has been coming to the Home Depot to wait for people to hire him for the day."Why are they doing this if people are just struggling to pick up work?" Sanchez said.A bigger hub for migrant removal operations?Sunday's action at the Home Depot came two days after The Bulwark, a center-right news and analysis Substack website, reported that Department of Homeland Security officials have selected Phoenix to become a bigger hub for immigration and removal operations because of its location in a border state.Citing three former Homeland Security officials in contact with current DHS officials, The Bulwark article said Phoenix was "about to become the next focus of arrests, detentions, and deportations."The Washington Post also reported on Dec. 24 that the Department of Homeland Security was seeking contractors to renovate seven industrial centers nationwide into large-scale immigration detention centers to hold up to 80,000 people at a time, including one in Glendale.A former DHS official told The Bulwark that adding thousands more beds in the Phoenix area would allow the Trump administration to turn the city into a “hub of removal” in the Southwest.Glendale officials were aware of the Washington Post report of a possible ICE warehouse facility in Glendale, city spokesperson Lesley Miller said.“However, the city has not received any information or notice from the federal government about the plan,” Miller said an an email.McLaughlin, the assistant DHS secretary, confirmed ICE's plans to expand immigration arrests and detention space with funding from H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill budget legislation signed into law in July. But she said there were no new detention facilities to announce at this time.The detention facilities that are planned are not "warehouses," she said."They are detention facilities. Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space," she said.She also said ICE was targeting the "worst of the worst including murderers, rapists, criminals, gang members and more."She said 70% of ICE arrests were of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S. "Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities," she said.Arizona already serves as an immigration and removal hub, but creating a facility to hold up to 5,000 more people would greatly expand that capacity.The state currently has four large immigration detention centers, with a combined capacity of about 3,300 beds.The facilities include a 400-capacity center in Florence in central Arizona and a 700-capacity center in San Luis in southwestern Arizona operated by ICE.Arizona also has a 1,500-capacity immigration detention center in Eloy operated under a contract with DHS by the private prison company, CoreCivic. CoreCivic also holds several hundred immigration detainees in prisons it runs in Florence under a contract with DHS, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.The immigration detention centers are used to house immigrants arrested in Arizona along with immigration detainees flown by ICE to Arizona from other states. ICE also deports immigration detainees at land ports in Nogales and other cities along Arizona's border with Mexico.Several airlines also have flown deportation flights under contract with ICE and DHS from the Mesa Gateway Airport in suburban Mesa east of Phoenix, including Avelo Airlines, which had operated deportation-related flights domestically, and Eastern Airlines, which has been flying deportation flights to Venezuela.Adding thousands of immigration detention beds in the Phoenix area would allow Homeland Security to "significantly expand its operations in other Western cities, including Denver, Las Vegas, and L.A.," the former DHS official told The Bulwark.In addition, Management and Training Corporation, a Utah-based, privately owned, for-profit prison company, in July 2025 purchased a 500-bed shuttered state prison in Marana, with possible plans to convert the facility into an immigration detention center. The uncertainty over the prison company's plans for the former prison has drawn criticism from residents.Why escalating immigration enforcement in Arizona 'makes sense'Expanding immigration enforcement operations in Arizona "makes sense' considering the state's sizable undocumented population, said Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors more immigration enforcement and less immigration.Arizona has about 307,000 undocumented immigrants, Arthur said, citing data from the Migration Policy Institute. About 14% of Arizona's undocumented population has lived in the United States for less than five years, Arthur noted, citing the institute's data.“Even if you only go after that, the 43,000, the 14% who are here unlawfully, that would still have a significant impact on the total unauthorized population in Arizona. So it would be a smart use of resources,” Arthur said.The majority of the state's undocumented population, however, 57%, has lived in the United States for 20 years or more, according to the institute.Arizona's undocumented population makes up about 4% of the state's overall population of 7.1 million, according to census data.Arthur said it makes sense for immigration enforcement officers to go to work sites to look for people known to have violated immigration laws because "generally workers will return to either a work site or to a specific place in which they regularly pick up tools of the trade or needed materials.”But he said conducting immigration sweeps at home improvement stores without a specific target are “generally not a wise use of resources.”U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, R-Arizona, did not respond directly to questions about whether he supports using ICE resources to arrest day laborers at Home Depots. His congressional district covers the area where advocates and day laborers said ICE carried out the Jan. 4 enforcement action."I have been a longtime supporter of enforcing our existing immigration laws so that we can secure our border and stop illegal immigration," Schweikert said in a written email statement.One Big Beautiful Bill could fund more arrests and deportationsThe "Big Beautiful Bill," the Republican-led federal budget bill signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, includes $170 billion in additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security to ramp up immigration enforcement, deportations and border security. The $170 billion includes $45 billion to increase immigration detention capacity, a massive increase from $3.5 billion that Congress allocated for immigration detention in fiscal year 2024.The massive increase in additional funding could give ICE the staffing and resources to greatly escalate immigration arrests and deportations over the next three to six months in Arizona, said Kevin Appleby, a senior fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York.The Trump administration has targeted Democratic-controlled cities over the past year, including Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago and Minneapolis, where thousands of federal immigration agents and National Guard troops have descended to carry out large-scale, highly visible military-style immigration enforcement actions.Focusing on the Phoenix area could be part of a political strategy by the Trump administration to shore up support from Republican voters in Arizona, a swing state, headed into the 2026 midterm elections, Appleby said.Trump carried Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and also Arizona, over Democrat and former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.“Now they're moving toward states which the administration won in 2024 but could go Democratic, either in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” Appleby said. “This might reflect them trying to shore up that base, because there've been cracks, political cracks in the base over the last few months. And this might be an attempt to shore up that base to show them ‘look, we're doing what we said we're going to do.’”An escalation of federal immigration enforcement in Arizona hearkens back to 2010 and the passage of Arizona's sweeping immigration enforcement law, Senate Bill 1070, Appleby said. The law sought to beef up immigration enforcement in Arizona by requiring local police to question people they encountered about their immigration status if they had "reasonable suspicion" they were in the United States without legal immigration status."We saw U.S. citizens and green card holders (legal permanent residents) being detained because the local law enforcement was not well-trained in immigration law. So that could be a result of this as well. You could see the same results that we saw during that period when Senate Bill 1070 was being debated, not only in the state, but nationwide," Appleby said.'It's like a game of dogs and cats'On Tuesday, Jan. 6, two days after the ICE action at the Home Depot on Thomas Road, dozens of day laborers stood in the parking lot waiting to be hired for the day.One of t