Federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have arrested 2,373 illegal immigrants nationwide in President Donald Trump’s first week in office, according to a review of government data.
Arrests started last Monday, Jan. 20, after Trump was sworn into office in Washington and have grown day to day with numbers ticking up into the weekend.
The number of immigrants arrested by ICE officers in cities across the country doubled, even tripled, in some cases from less than 300 per day on certain days last week to nearly 1,000 on Sunday alone.
— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) January 24, 2025
If ICE continues at this rate per week, officers will arrest approximately 124,000 people in a year, but Trump is likely to go after far more illegal immigrants than that given that arrests have continued to increase recently.
At the rate of 956 arrests Sunday, Trump would nab upward of 340,000 people by this time next year.
In fiscal 2024, which began in October 2023 and ended in September 2024, ICE took 113,431 illegal immigrants into custody, down from 170,590 people in 2023.
During Trump’s first term in office, he fluctuated between 103,000 and 159,000 arrests per year.
#Immigration #ICEERO pic.twitter.com/ee4zKKD6aT
— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) January 27, 2025
ICE has the legal authority to arrest someone who is in the country illegally, as mandated by Congress to do so, and is prioritizing arresting immigrants who have criminal histories.
White House “border czar” Tom Homan has warned that “collateral” arrests are inevitable and others will be taken into custody when ICE goes into a home or office and finds other people who are illegally residing in the country after overstaying a visa or coming over the border without permission.
Arrests are typically made one by one, meaning ICE officers will seek out a specific individual and show up at his or her work or home or encounter that person while in public. Raids would happen when a large employer fails an audit of its employees.
The Republican National Committee and Trump promised as part of its 2024 agenda to carry out the “largest-ever” deportation operation in U.S. history if elected, and that has remained the new administration’s priority.
As a candidate, Trump railed against “migrant crime,” or crimes committed by illegal immigrants who came over the southern border without authorization. The first piece of legislation Congress sent him was an immigration law named for Laken Riley, a nursing student who was murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant who entered the United States illegally.
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In signing more than a dozen executive orders last Monday, Trump made immigration and border security a leading issue of his second term.
Trump has enabled federal law enforcement from agencies other than ICE, as well as called on state and local law enforcement, to help immigration officers make arrests.