ICE Set to Arrest a Record 35,000 Immigrants in June, Daily Quotas are Political - Not Practical (Part 2)
In Part 2 of my series on ICE arrest data made public by the Deportation Data Project, we examine daily and monthly arrest totals and project record arrests by the end of this month.
This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on ICE ERO administrative arrest data made public by the Deportation Data Project. If you haven’t yet, you may want to read Part 1 or listen to my Substack Live explanation before reading Part 2.
The Trump administration is now demanding that ICE make 3,000 arrests per day—an increase from the 1,200-1,500-per-day arrest quotas announced earlier this year. By analyzing detailed data published by the Deportation Data Project, we can put these quotas in context to understand whether these goals are practically attainable, merely rhetorical, or some combination of two. In the course of trying to answer that question, I made an important discovery: ICE is on track to make record numbers of arrests this month.
Let’s walk through this together.
As I explained yesterday, the ICE ERO dataset represents detailed arrest-by-arrest information, including the date of each of the more than 95,000 arrests made by the Trump administration as well as arrests by the Biden administration going back to the beginning of FY 2024 (i.e., October 2023).
Normally, if we want to determine the daily number of ICE arrests, we have to make some inferences and use daily averages rather than calculate the number directly. But with this data, we can finally do the direct analysis required to support more definitive conclusions.
This is not a tremendously sophisticated analysis: we simply need to aggregate the new arrest data to each calendar day and each calendar month. This can be done with a simple pivot table with frequency counts using the date field. In the example of monthly totals below, I supplement the monthly totals from the FOIA data that go back to FY 2024 with data from OHSS that go back to 2014. (Remember: I am only able to do this because I already verified that the OHSS data and the FOIA data are congruent; be careful when mixing data sources.) To make a projection for June, I simply took the data for the 10 days of June1 (11,591), averaged it to get a daily number then multiplied it by 30 days in June.
Using this method we can clearly observe an increase in ICE arrests since the start of the Trump administration. Monthly arrest totals already reached 22,613 in May, which was very high. Here’s where some professional judgment is necessary. It is hard to say whether 22,000 is the highest on record because I am not aware of data older than 2014, and it is entirely plausible that arrests were higher than 22,000—especially during the first Obama administration. We just don’t know.
However, if the projection of about 35,000 holds true, this number starts to feel like a strong candidate for a true historical high. The key to writing about this honestly and accurately is to say that this is the “highest total monthly arrests on record,” with the “on record” doing the heavy lifting of qualifying that we only have authoritative data going back to FY 2014.
The ICE data analysis in this newsletter is only possible because of your support. If you believe in keeping this work free and open to the public, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can read more about the mission and focus of this newsletter and learn why, after three years, I finally decided to offer a paid option. If you already support this newsletter financially, thank you.
Sometimes it is helpful to have a shorter time series, so as a matter of convenience, here is the same data from the start of FY 2024 (October 2023) to present.
Now let’s return to evaluating the daily arrest quotas demanded by the Trump administration, by aggregating the arrest data for each calendar day and graphing it to make it easier to visualize. David Bier published a terrific article using the same data source and he uses a weekly (7-day) backward rolling total of arrests, which is a smart way to even out the fluctuations in daily arrests. There are many ways we could responsibly summarize and visualize the data.
For my purposes here, I am going to show the un-smoothed daily totals, which will allow us to do two things at the same time: (1) we can evaluate ICE’s arrest quotas against reality and (2) you can see the weekday bias that affects virtually all administrative data. By “weekday bias,” I simply mean that the government typically only operates, or only operates in full force, on the weekdays. Thus, we see this trend in five days (weekdays) of high arrests, followed by two days (weekends) of lower—but not zero—arrests.
Despite an initial heavy surge in arrests at the end of January, ICE’s daily totals did not come close to crossing 100 arrests per day until well into May and did not cross 1,500 until June. That is to say, ICE did not come close to meeting the quota set in January until June—and even then; only for a few days at a time. To be clear: this is a lot of arrests. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s also clear that the Trump administration’s daily arrest quotas are detached from the reality of what ICE can do—and even more so now that the new quota is 3,000 per day.
This prompts a further question: if these quotas are demonstrably unattainable, why have them? In my view, the answer is simple: the unattainability of the quotas is the point.
An essential component of Donald Trump’s longstanding approach to politics is to invent crises, or exploit existing crises, in ways that ensure they are unsolvable. No amount of funding for immigration enforcement will ever be enough to achieve his mass deportation goals. No amount of power concentrated in the office of the President will ever be sufficient to exercise totalizing control over immigration. The goal is not to solve a real problem, but to manufacture an ever-expanding crisis that justifies ever-expanding unregulated power.
This is evident not just in the new ICE arrest quotas, but also in the ratcheted up claims that there are 20 million, 30 million, even 40 million undocumented immigrants! The poorly substantiated numbers increase incrementally in proportion with each policy win in favor of immigration restrictionists.
As we can see, a close look at ICE arrest data helps us to evaluate the Trump administration’s policies and interpret these policies in light of their connection with—and disconnection from—reality. In this post, I emphasized the use of time-series analysis at the daily and monthly level, and showed how to put those numbers in conversation with how immigration enforcement policy is quickly evolving.
You may find other ways of analyzing and interpreting the data—and if you do, please let me know! I’m always open to different views and new perspectives.
If you are enjoying this series, stick around. We have already contextualized the data, validated it, and looked at changes over time. Next, we will look at who has been arrested by ICE under the Trump administration by analyzing the data on nationality, criminal background, and where people are arrested.
Support public scholarship.
This newsletter is only possible because of your support. If you believe in keeping this work un-paywalled and freely open to the public, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can read more about the mission of this newsletter, why I finally decided to offer a paid option, and the impact of this work in 2025 so far.
The data includes three (3) arrests for June 11, but obviously that is incomplete, so don’t count that day.