ICE just posted its biggest monthly arrest number of President Donald Trump’s second term, and the trajectory is not exactly subtle.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested 49,571 illegal migrants in July, according to figures reported by the Associated Press.
Nearly 50,000 arrests. One month.
Now, stay with me, because the comparisons tell the story better than the headline does.
June saw 43,021 arrests, meaning July jumped roughly 15 percent in a single month. Go back to February, when ICE reported 29,241 arrests, and July was about 70 percent higher.
That is a serious acceleration.
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies says ICE has managed to increase enforcement even while the agency has faced political opposition, protests and intense scrutiny over its operations.
ICE “didn’t stop the enforcement,” Krikorian said. “They changed the tactics and are, if anything, being more effective.”
And one of those tactical changes is becoming increasingly obvious: ICE has a lot more local help than it did when Trump returned to office.
The federal 287(g) program allows ICE to enter agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, authorizing trained local officers to carry out certain immigration-enforcement functions under federal supervision.
When Trump began his second term, about 135 agencies were enrolled in the program, according to published reports.
Today? More than 1,400.
That’s not a minor expansion. That is a fundamental increase in the number of local agencies participating in federal immigration enforcement.
You can see it in July’s numbers.
According to the AP, local law enforcement assisted with approximately 6,500 immigration arrests during the month. That works out to about 13 percent of ICE’s total.
Compare that with July of last year, when local law enforcement was involved in roughly five percent of arrests.
So yes, ICE is arresting more people, and local agencies are accounting for a growing share of those arrests.
DHS had already reported in June that 356,389 migrants had been arrested during the fiscal year to that point.
But here comes the twist: some of the loudest complaints about these numbers aren’t coming from immigration activists who oppose Trump’s enforcement program.
They’re coming from immigration hawks who think the administration is still moving too slowly.
Oversight Project President Mike Howell told ABC News that even these increased figures remain far below the scale necessary to fulfill Trump’s mass-deportation promise.
“The point is the numbers remain wildly disproportionately low to the scale of illegals let in by Biden and the promise of mass deportation,” Howell said.
And Howell has a specific prescription: workplaces.
“The numbers will stay low until worksite enforcement is the central pillar of the strategy,” he said.
Howell also said he is worried that what he considers inflated deportation statistics could eventually be used by advocates of an immigration compromise to claim sufficient enforcement has already occurred. He said he is suing DHS to obtain additional data.
That leaves the Trump administration in an interesting position.
Nearly 50,000 arrests in a month is the administration’s second-term record. Arrests have climbed sharply since February. Local police partnerships have expanded by roughly tenfold. Yet some of the administration’s natural allies are looking at the same figures and saying: faster.
Meanwhile, DHS says it is tightening immigration enforcement beyond arrests.
A department spokesperson said the administration had reversed a Biden-era policy that DHS characterized as allowing illegal migrants to travel domestically by air.
“Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this,” the spokesperson said. “This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”
So here’s where things stand.
February: 29,241 ICE arrests.
June: 43,021.
July: 49,571.
That line is moving decisively upward.
