According to a Guardian Review of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, US immigration enforcement officials arrested more people in the first 22 days of February 2025 than they had in the past seven years.
Analyzing President Donald Trump’s first month’s DHS data, the Guardian Review shows how the administration changed immigration enforcement in the US in just a few weeks, in addition to interviews with immigration lawyers, advocates and former ICE staff.
In a hurry to meet Trump’s “massive deportation” goal, the administration moved to quickly close the borders in the southern United States. They have suspended asylum programs and other Biden-era programs that offer humanitarian relief. At the same time, it expanded immigration enforcement in the country.
Immigration officers are arresting more people, as well as placing an increasing number in detention. DHS announced Tuesday that immigrant detention has been filled to capacity along with 47,600 detainees.
The Guardian analysis also says the administration is targeting “criminals,” but instead reveals that ice enforcement has become more indiscriminate. And it shows that when the administration tries to tighten arrests it is restructuring its relationship with federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement agencies.
“What we’re seeing is a real scattering of different tactics,” said Gracie Willis, a rapid response lawyer for the National Immigration Project, a member organization of lawyers and immigration advocates.
Both Democrats and Republican administrations have implemented strict immigration policies, Willis added. But she argued that the Biden administration has at least revealed which immigrants prioritize detention and removal. “There was an idea of which clients were at risk,” she said. “I think there’s this lack of predictability right now.”
Indiscriminate execution
Immigration agents showed great strength within the first weeks of the Trump administration, staging a flashy televised attack that allegedly pursued criminals and gang members.
ICE highlighted images of bulletproof vest agents, searching for members of Tren de Aragua Gang, along with counterparts from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and former US s. In daily social media posts for the first few days of the new administration, ICE shared names and images of the criminals and fugitives they suspected of arresting.
However, the administration’s policies and arrest data over the past month reveal different focuses.
One of Trump’s first actions as president was to roll back a Biden-era memo that directed ice enforcement agents to prioritize arrests of those who pose threats to national security and public safety. Instead, the Trump administration has made it clear that it considers people in the United States without legal status to be subject to arrest and removal.
Between January 12 and February 9, the number of immigrants detained in ICE who had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges between January 12th and February 9th saw a 221% increase in the number of immigrants detained by ICE.
According to federal government data, in November 2024, people without criminal convictions accounted for around 6% of people in ice custody. By February 2025, that number had reached 16%.
“We’ve been working hard to get into the world,” said David Hausman, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. “First, they know they’re trying to maximize the number of arrests every day, meaning they don’t think about what they’re doing. Second, they have the goal of explicitly spreading fear among American immigrants, and indiscriminate arrests also achieve that.”
“If your goal is to increase the number of deportations, you can’t hit mass removals without focusing on the non-criminal population,” said John Sandweg, acting ice director for the Obama administration.
That’s not to say that the previous administration would arrest immigrants and not deport them if they had no criminal history. But the Trump administration has reoriented the agency’s enforcement strategy to meet its enthusiasm to speed up the president’s enthusiasm, Sandweg said.
“There are some bad guys in this country,” he said. “But getting them requires more traditional detective jobs. You go out and build informants in your community, find people who are gaining immigrant communities, and have people from those communities work together, discuss and share information.” It could take hundreds of hours of work to book just one person accused of serious crimes or gang-related charges, but it’s quick to indiscriminately arrest someone without legal status.
Granular data on who the Trump administration is arresting is more difficult to get than detention data. DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics will release detailed arrest data for the ice and break down the number of arrests due to criminal history. However, OHSS data has not been updated since November 2024. Between October 2022 and November 2024, 78% of those arrested by agents were either convicted of a misdemeanor or were not convicted at all.
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In some cases, it is likely that the agent was looking for an address where immigrants with either criminal history or removal orders reside, said Veronica Cardenas, an immigration lawyer and former aide at ICE. However, if targeted people or people are not at home or moved, agents may try to check the immigration status of those still there and can arrest them if they are not documented.
“One of my clients told me he lives in a house where the former resident of the apartment had an order to remove it,” Cardenas said. “That’s a bad thing because if they go looking for that former resident, he’s still getting the email there so they’ll find my clients and they could have the authority to restrain them.”
Immigration advocates are also increasingly concerned that clients placed under electronic surveillance, including phone apps and ankle monitors, will be at risk of arrest or removal orders. The extent to which the federal government uses electronic surveillance systems to target immigrants is still unknown, but lawyers and advocacy groups have reported that some have been convened in detention or issued orders in recent weeks.
“These are not people who had any kind of status changes,” says Willis of the National Immigration Project. “These are not people who are harming themselves in the community. They are observing what they need,” said Willis because the government knows exactly who they are and where they are — they can be particularly vulnerable to immigration enforcement.
New relationships with law enforcement
As the administration attempts to tighten arrests, it is restructuring relations between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement agencies. Since Trump took office, the Trump administration has approved more than 226 new contracts under the 287(g) program. This allows state and local law enforcement officials to work with the federal government to enforce immigration laws.
By contrast, no new contracts were finalized under the programs that took place in December 2020 and February 2025, including during the Biden administration.
Under the 287(g) agreement, local law enforcement agencies could identify and deal with those arrested, and ICE allowed local officers to train them to provide services to ICE’s management warrants. A third type of 287(g) contract, called the task force model, granted local law enforcement many of the same authority as ICE agents, but was repealed in January 2013 after ICE policy memos were found to be ineffective. Advocates point out that these programs especially encourage racial profiling by local law enforcement agencies.
However, the Trump administration is trying to get them back, describing these programs as “power multipliers.” Of the 226 new memorandums (MOUs) signed in 2025, 141 were made for the new Task Force 287(g) program.
These new agreements could increase police in immigrant communities where ice and other federal agents are increasingly patrol neighborhoods and residential areas, where they are experiencing significant disruptions in their daily lives.
Laura Rivera, a senior employee at Just Futures Law, an immigration law firm, said: “And increasingly, agencies seem to be targeting people in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
This article was revised on March 13, 2025. The number of people without criminal convictions in ice detention had risen to 16% by February 2025, not 2024.
