Deportations and street arrests have risen exponentially, researchers find

The number of deportations within the United States increased by a factor of five in the first year under the current presidential administration, according to a new report by the Deportation Data Project.

The report follows the latest release by the project, which is led by scholars at UCLA and UC Berkeley Law and Freedom of Information Act attorneys, of new and updated individual-level Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data.

The dataset now includes all arrests, detentions and deportations between Oct. 1, 2022, and March 10, 2026. The information was obtained by the project through lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act and is publicly accessible on the project's website.

The researchers compared immigration enforcement at the end of the Biden administration with the start of the second Trump administration through March 10, 2026, including the recent large-scale enforcement operations in major cities.

"We show that enforcement didn't just surge in LA, Chicago and Minneapolis," said report author Graeme Blair of UCLA, who co-directs the Deportation Data Project. "In fact, even at the peak of the Minneapolis surge, those arrests accounted for only 15% of nationwide street arrests."

Arrests also occurred at high rates in the rest of the country. Blair, who is a professor of political science, emphasized, "The expansion is truly national."

Overall, the report found that ICE arrests more than quadrupled from the end of the Biden administration to January 2026. Previously, most arrests under the agency came from jail and prison transfers. These also increased, roughly doubling in the period reviewed. However, the shift toward increased street arrests - defined here as occurring in neighborhoods and at local businesses, as well as in immigration court and regular check-ins - represented a new phenomenon, with those numbers increasing by a factor of 11.

As the administration detained more individuals and released fewer, the researchers found that the number of daily detention beds holding people arrested inside the United States quadrupled over the course of 2025. This was up from a daily average of around 14,000 in the second half of 2024 to around 57,000 in January 2026.

When it came to people without criminal convictions, the researchers found arrests went up more than eightfold. The rate of deportations more than doubled for those who also did not have a removal order before arrest.

"It's well known that ICE has been pursuing a campaign of indiscriminate arrests, but it's less well known that even as ICE has arrested more people who likely could win their cases and stay in the United States, arrests have been ending more often in deportation," said project co-director and report author David Hausman, an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley. "One big reason is that detention is making people give up on their cases."

As the administration made it increasingly difficult for those detained to be released, including by making it harder to obtain bond and be released while awaiting judicial review, voluntary departures and returns to country of origin increased 28-fold.

Despite the latest information showing a small decline in enforcement after the deaths of protestors Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the researchers noted that this has not yet translated into a decline in removals.

The latest report is an update to a previous analysis covering the first nine months of the current administration. It draws on nearly five months of new data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.