ICE Arrests Quadrupled in First Year of Trump Administration

Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement more than quadrupled after President Trump took office in January 2025, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. The Trump administration doubled traditional transfers of custody from jails or prisons to ICE while increasing community, or street, arrests by more than elevenfold compared to before 2025.

There was also an eightfold increase in arrests of noncitizens without a criminal conviction.

The Deportation Data Project, founded by a political scientist and two lawyers, published its analysis of ICE activity during the first year of the second Trump administration after obtaining national immigration enforcement data through the Freedom of Information Act.

NPR reported that men made up over 90 percent of those arrested by ICE in the studied time period. ICE agents detained two people on January 13 in Minneapolis and patrolled Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport on March 24, 2026, in New York, New York.

Shortly after Inauguration Day in 2025, Planet Money visited Little Village, a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago. It felt oddly quiet for what was usually a bustling part of the city, almost like a ghost town. Many in the community seemed scared to go about business as usual.

The paper has not gone through peer review. It analyzes data from the first nine months of the Trump administration using a difference-in-differences approach comparing areas with high versus low ICE enforcement. The economists defined likely undocumented workers as foreign-born individuals with at most a high school degree or equivalent who work in sectors where undocumented workers are over-represented.

They found these workers reduced their employment by a significant 4 percent due to the chilling effect. The larger economic effect comes from undocumented immigrants who remain being scared to go about business as usual, East stated. -born men with at most a high-school education in sectors heavily reliant on undocumented labor experienced reduced employment due to increased ICE activity.

-born worker working in that labor market, according to East. Undocumented immigrants make up a significant share of the labor force in food service, agriculture, childcare and construction. -born workers," East stated.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson stated: "Let's be clear, if there was any correlation between rampant illegal immigration and a good economy, Biden would have had a booming economy. " After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, nationwide ICE street arrests declined to roughly their September 2025 levels.

The "One Big Beautiful Bill" will allow ICE to hire more officers and expand detention capacity.

East's study covers the first nine months of the Trump administration, before that decline. East has previously studied the economic effects of deportations under earlier administrations and found similar patterns of chilling effects on economic activity.