Deportation Data Project from UCLA and UC Berkeley helps draw clearer picture of recent immigration crackdowns

As immigration raids continue across Los Angeles, a recent Los Angeles Times analysis found that of the 722 individuals arrested by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) in the region between June 1 to 10, 69% had no criminal convictions and 58% had never been charged with a crime.

These findings were drawn from data released by the Deportation Data Project, a centralized repository of individual-level U.S. government immigration enforcement data based at UC Berkeley Law School in collaboration with UCLA's Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP), and Graeme Blair, associate professor of political science at UCLA. The data are helping draw a clearer picture of the scale of apprehensions and deportations, as well as who the government is targeting, both locally and nationally.

"Unfortunately, some of these enforcement policies aren't written down, by design, so the only way to document them is through data analysis," said Blair, who is the project's deputy director.

To obtain the data, Blair said his team is filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation for different categories of data from ICE and Customs and Border Protection, among others.

"We realize there's an urgent need to make this data publicly accessible so advocates, journalists and the general public can analyze it to better understand the impact of recent enforcement efforts," he added.

Since the project's most recent data were made available, in addition to the Los Angeles Times, outlets such as The New York Times and CBS have done just that, concluding that:

• There have been 94,906 immigration arrests from inauguration through June 11 compared to 45,558 such arrests in the same period in 2024. In that period, in 2025, 41% had been convicted of crimes, compared to 52% in 2024. (The Washington Post)
• California is the state with the third highest number of immigration arrests after Texas and Florida, with arrests up 123% compared to 2024. (The New York Times)
• About 8% of individuals had convictions for violent crimes, according to an analysis of the most serious charges. The largest category of charges among those with convictions was traffic offenses. (CBS News)

The most recent dataset was obtained through a FOIA lawsuit against ICE brought by CILP, represented by Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP and the Law Office of Amber Qureshi. The dataset includes anonymized identifiers that correspond to individuals, allowing users to follow individuals through the enforcement process without learning their identities. This data includes every ICE encounter, arrest, detainer request and booking-to-detention between September 2023 and June 10, 2025.

"Unlike statistics typically published by the government, the data are provided here at the level of the individual enforcement action," said Ahilan Arulanantham, faculty co-director at CILP. "This granular data enables researchers, advocates and journalists to study the immigration enforcement regime in far greater depth than is often the case."

Those patterns include, among others, trends in arrests for any specific ICE field office; trends, by detention center, and the length of detention; trends in transfers across detention centers; and trends, by detention center, in the chance of release versus deportation.

In the coming months, the Deportation Data Project will be focused on continuing to file additional FOIA requests and building documentation for the data. It will also work to make the data more accessible for non-expert users.

"Whatever you believe about immigration policy, Americans have a right to know how public dollars and public prisons are being used, and these data provide the first big glimpse into that. The picture is very different from the one promoted by the Trump Administration," said Blair.