Report on First Year of Immigration Enforcement Under Second Trump Administration

[Deportation Data Updates]

We have just posted our second report analyzing data on interior immigration enforcement under the second Trump Administration. The summary is below.

There is no underlying data update to announce: this report relies on the previous ICE data release, which covers enforcement through March 10, 2026. We always promptly release data we receive from the government; all Deportation Data Project analyses use data we have already made public. We will never hold data before release for our own use.

Executive summary

The number of deportations within the United States increased by a factor of five over the course of the first year of the second Trump administration. This new finding comes from a Deportation Data Project release of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data covering the first year-plus of the Trump administration. The new dataset covers the period from the middle of the Biden administration through March 10, 2026. Comparing the last six months of the Biden administration to the recent peak of enforcement in January 2026, we find the following key trends:

First, ICE arrests more than quadrupled (4.4x). ICE transfers from jails and prisons, which accounted for most ICE arrests before 2025, roughly doubled. ICE street arrests went up by a factor of eleven — including not only arrests in neighborhoods, but also immigration court and at ICE field offices during regular check-ins. Arrests not in jails or prisons at this order of magnitude are a new phenomenon. For both types of arrests, ICE was much less likely to target people with criminal convictions. These changes led to over an eightfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions.

Second, the quadrupling (4.4x) of arrests resulted in an even larger rise (5x) in deportations because of increased detention space and decreased releases. The administration more than quadrupled (4.5x) the number of detention beds used for people arrested within the United States. That capacity increase was a result both of new funding (for new detention centers and more beds in existing detention centers) and of a decrease in arrests at the border. The large new detention centers ICE built or reopened accounted for less than a quarter of the new space.

In the past, people without criminal convictions were often released from detention on bond. That changed in 2025. Release within 60 days of arrest, common for people without criminal convictions who did not have a removal order before arrest in the last six months of the Biden administration (35%), became rare (7%). The rate of deportation within two months of arrest doubled for this group, from 27% to 57%. The declining release rate accounted for most of that increase in deportations. Perhaps because of the lower release rate, many more people chose to give up on their cases: voluntary departures and returns (which are rare compared to removals) increased by 28 times.

A small decline in enforcement in February and early March 2026, after Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s killings in Minneapolis, did little to change these basic patterns. Arrests dipped by about a quarter after their peak in early January.