Over the summer, ICE stepped up enforcement efforts across the country leading to reports that the agency has arrested a record 51,000 people in the month of July alone. The latest data published by the Deportation Data Project (DDP) this week allows us to investigate the summer surge and tell a deeper, fact-driven story about what ICE has been doing, where, and to whom that is not otherwise possible because ICE refuses to release information to the public and Republicans in Congress chose not to tie basic transparency requirements to their latest massive funding bill. These new data tell a story that the agency would rather keep hidden—and you’ll see why.1
A quick reminder that the fall of 2025 already saw a surge in arrests, with an average of 36,348 arrests per month from September through January. This previous surge was characterized by aggressive, targeted operations that drew criticism and on-the-ground observation and counter-protests. These tactics also led to the death of two U.S. citizens and corresponding outrage, even among many Trump supporters. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin in March. The number of ICE arrests and detention numbers increased again only modestly between February and May but remained around 30,000–32,000, below the fall 2025 surge.
That all changed in June and July. June set a recent record of 42,637 arrests and July set a new record again with 49,138 arrests in a single month.2 I had previously estimated that ICE arrested about 1,300 per day for the month of June and 1,474 for the first 11 days of the month of July based on the most recent ICE detention management spreadsheet. DDP’s data allows us to be more precise. ICE arrested in 1,421 in June, 1,585 in July, and 1,469 for the first five full days of data in August. The increase from May to June this summer was one of the largest month-over-month jumps in arrests, making the surge visible in the data, even though ICE’s current tactics have been less visible than the chaos in Minneapolis at the start of the year.
Consistent with the Trump administration’s well-documented pattern of misrepresenting immigrants as threats to national security and public safety, the DHS propaganda machine spent the summer pushing a false narrative that the surge in arrests focused on the worst of the worst. DHS press releases highlight a small number of serious criminals, hoping that selective misrepresentation will give the impression that all immigrants are violent offenders. The Trump administration’s claims go on.
Just days ago, DHS told KSL: “From day one, DHS has remained singularly focused on removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the United States and is always evaluating the best methods to do so. These heinous criminals, once arrested, should be removed at lightning speed, not housed on American soil at the taxpayer’s expense.”
An August 10 DHS press release quotes Secretary Mullin as saying: “While Americans enjoyed their weekend, the patriots of ICE worked around the clock to remove murderers, drunk drivers, pedophiles, sexual predators, drug traffickers, and other public safety threats from our communities.”
DHS Secretary Mullin’s claims are emphatically untrue. This is not a political opinion, this is simply what the data say—there’s no way around it.
The ICE summer surge in arrests—to record numbers, let’s not forget—was driven almost entirely by a focus on people with no criminal history; i.e., neither a pending charge nor a conviction. June and July, the last two full months on record, saw the highest percentage of people arrested without any criminal history going back to the start of this administration. In June, it was about 47% of all arrests and in July it was over 50%. Half of all people arrested have no criminal history on record whatsoever.
A declining percentage of people had charges or convictions and, in fact, just 1 in 5 arrests as of the limited August data had a conviction—the lowest in the dataset so far. Remember that very few charges and convictions are serious violent offenses; see my careful analysis of Delaney Hall.
If you are newer to this Substack, you might benefit from going back and looking at my prediction of this trend at the start of the Trump administration. This is exactly what the research said would happen.
The story continues in total numbers. Although there was an increase of a little less than 20% for people with charges and convictions, people with no criminal history increased over 100% (more than doubled). This is not what it looks like for ICE to go after the “worst of the worst.” This is what it looks like for ICE to round people up who represent no public safety threat as part of a misinformation campaign to do one thing and spin it as something else.
There is more to be said about this data, including what is and is not in the data this go-around, and how we can use data to understand the broader trends in immigration enforcement. But this post should at least give you an initial look at the data. Don’t forget to subscribe and consider becoming a paid subscriber so this work can continue.
Great news! —> The Deportation Data Project is holding a webinar on this release on Wednesday, August 26 at 1:00 PM Eastern. Anyone planning to work with these files should hear how the people who obtained them describe what changed. Register below.
News reports claim that the number was as high as 51,000 for July. This is within the realm of plausibility depending on how the data was sourced, but it is a good reminder that when a reporter “reports” a number they saw on a screen or told by an agency staffer, those numbers are not able to be independently and publicly validated and should be treated with due skepticism.
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