U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, marking the agency’s highest monthly arrest total since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, according to newly obtained government data.
ICE recorded 49,571 arrests during the month, a 15% increase from the 43,021 arrests reported in June and about 70% higher than the 29,241 arrests recorded in February. The figures were provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by The Associated Press.
The numbers point to a shift in how the Trump administration is carrying out its immigration crackdown. After large-scale operations in major cities drew intense public attention and protests earlier this year, enforcement has increasingly moved into communities through traffic stops, cooperation with local police and arrests of people who had previously been protected from deportation.
The administration has also expanded ICE’s workforce and increased its reliance on state and local law enforcement agencies to identify and detain immigrants.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter immigration restrictions, said the administration had not backed away from its enforcement campaign.
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“They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective,” Krikorian told the AP.
The scale of the increase is significant. In December 2025, ICE arrests surpassed 40,000, compared with just over 8,000 in the month before Trump took office. The increase followed changes that gave immigration officers broader discretion over whom and where they could arrest, along with billions of dollars in additional funding for the agency.
The federal government has largely stopped releasing detailed immigration enforcement statistics since the start of Trump’s second term. As a result, data compiled by the Deportation Data Project through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has become an important source for tracking ICE activity.
Local police are also playing a growing role.
State and local law enforcement agencies working with ICE accounted for about 6,500 arrests in July, or roughly 13% of the agency’s total. A year earlier, those partnerships represented less than 5% of monthly ICE arrests.
Texas and Florida alone accounted for nearly 20,000 arrests in July, underscoring the importance of the two states to the administration’s deportation strategy. Both have expanded cooperation with ICE through 287(g) agreements, which allow state and local officers to perform certain federal immigration enforcement functions.
One recent case in Key West, Florida, illustrates how those partnerships can play out.
A 36-year-old Haitian asylum seeker who had worked as a cook and supervisor at the Half Shell Raw Bar was arrested by local police and later transferred to ICE custody, according to the restaurant’s manager, Bobby Kuchinsky.
Kuchinsky said the man had fled Haiti in 2017 after receiving death threats and was the primary provider for his family. He declined to publicly identify the worker, citing concerns about his safety while in custody.
“He was an excellent worker, he learned very fast, he never had any problem with the law,” Kuchinsky told the AP.
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The Trump administration has repeatedly said its immigration enforcement efforts are focused on people who have committed crimes in the United States.
The July data, however, shows a broader picture. More than half of those arrested had not been convicted of a crime and were not facing criminal charges at the time of their arrest. Fewer than one in four had a criminal conviction.
About half of the arrests were also classified as non-custodial, meaning ICE agents arrested people in their communities rather than taking custody of individuals already held in local jails or prisons.
Traffic stops have become one of the settings where such arrests are increasingly taking place.
Patricia Quiñonez, a journalist with Utahzolanos, which covers Utah’s Venezuelan immigrant community, said she has seen a sharp rise in immigration arrests following traffic stops.
She said people can initially be stopped for relatively minor violations, such as driving without a license, having expired vehicle tags or having windows that are darker than permitted. Immigration questions can follow during the encounter.
Quiñonez said she has heard of people with valid work permits and pending asylum applications being arrested. She also believes some immigrants are being singled out because of their race.
The July figures suggest that while the administration’s immigration crackdown may look different from the highly visible operations seen earlier in Trump’s second term, the enforcement campaign itself has continued to expand.