After federal immigration agents ended their aggressive enforcement blitzes in the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago, President Donald Trump promised mass deportations with “a little bit of a softer touch.”
Less focused on targeted cities, this quieter approach has led to a surge in immigration arrests across the country.
Arrests began climbing gradually in March and by July had risen sharply. In nearly every state, arrests exceeded the number from the same period the year before. A Marshall Project analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data published by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA found that in many places the surge in enforcement has been dramatic. Even without a focus on high-profile operations, immigration arrests more than doubled in 15 states and Washington, D.C.
Republican-led states and communities across the country offered up their own law enforcement agencies to help, from the Texas and Florida highway patrols to sheriffs departments in Ohio and local police in Missouri.
A Department of Homeland Security press release reported ICE made nearly 51,000 arrests in August, higher than any month on record.
“We call it the ‘shadow surge,’” said Jill Garvey, director of States at the Core, a nonprofit that supports grassroots organizations confronting authoritarian threats. “It’s this much quieter, but no less violent or deadly, enforcement.”
Public outrage exploded in January when federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during an enforcement mission called Operation Metro Surge. Their deaths marked a turning point in the Trump administration’s campaign to round up and deport immigrants without authorization to be in the United States.
After months of flashy, made-for-media enforcement — agents piling out of a rented Penske truck at a Los Angeles Home Depot, rounding up hundreds of Korean autoworkers at a plant in Georgia, arresting a 5-year-old boy in a bunny hat in Minneapolis — Trump fired Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Trump’s new pick to run the department, Markwayne Mullin, promised to pursue the president’s goals with more cooperation from local law enforcement and less public backlash. Congress had already approved tens of billions of dollars to fund that mission.
The enforcement that has followed has been widespread, diffuse and harder for the national media to track. It’s also been measurably more effective.
ICE’s stepped-up enforcement looks different across the country. Federal authorities have cracked down on commercial truck drivers and arrested people at airports who had overstayed their visas. ICE has continued arrests of immigrants in neighborhoods and public places like hardware store parking lots. These operations can still be chaotic, like a raid of a Memphis bar that began as a state investigation into gambling and drugs and ended with immigration arrests, or immigration agents striking protestors with batons and dragging them from the porch of a home in Frederick, Maryland. In some states, immigrants are still most frequently brought into ICE custody through a transfer from a prison or jail, but increases in other kinds of arrests have led to a summer surge.
Roughly 2,000 state and local law enforcement agencies have signed agreements with the federal government to conduct immigration stops or hand over immigrants who are in local jails. Since ICE reset its tactics, arrests from these programs have grown considerably.
Texas and Florida, each led by Republican governors with possible national aspirations, have emerged as Trump’s top enforcers.
Texas accounted for a quarter of all immigration arrests in July. In Florida, ICE logged more than 7,000 immigration arrests, more than triple the number in that month the year before. Both states have directed their state troopers to conduct immigration stops. In Florida, the arrests often begin when people are stopped for traffic violations or driving without a license, said Palm Beach immigration attorney Jackie Delgado.
“They are not being taken to a jail and being booked in and seeing a judge,” she said. “They’re skirting the justice system and heading directly to ICE.”
Other states, including Missouri and Ohio, are blips on the nationwide scale of immigration enforcement. But each has seen arrests climb as local police lean into the cooperation agreements with ICE.
In 2024, neither state had a single local police agency enforcing immigration laws for ICE through what are colloquially called 287(g) agreements — a reference to the federal regulation that created the program. Today, 130 law enforcement agencies in Missouri and 20 in Ohio have signed up.
“The signing of these 287(g) agreements has really turned all of our local law enforcement into these ‘show me your papers’ forces,” said Gabby Eissner, advocacy strategist at the St. Louis-based MICA Project, which provides low-cost and pro bono legal services to immigrants. “People are getting picked up at traffic stops, and those traffic stops are happening because of the color of their skin.”
Since June, ICE has set new monthly records for signing up local law enforcement partners, according to a Marshall Project analysis of agreements listed on the agency’s website. With greater swaths of the country patrolled by ICE’s local partners, advocates say it’s getting harder to distinguish routine traffic stops from targeted immigration arrests.
“The 287(g) agreements and the cooperation with local law enforcement are making it challenging for people to document what’s happening in their communities,” said Garvey, who leads the authoritarian watchdog organization.
In Southwest Ohio, the quietly expanding immigration machinery is on full display in Hamilton, the seat of conservative Butler County. There, Sheriff Richard Jones has had an “Illegal Aliens Here” sign outside the jail for two decades. He quickly inked 287(g) agreements after Trump returned to office last year.
Jones told The Marshall Project that 44 of his deputies, or about a quarter of his law enforcement personnel, are ICE-trained to identify undocumented immigrants. They initiate most of the hundreds of stops that have led to ICE arrests in the county, but police officers working for other local departments also call his deputies, widening the net.
So far in 2026, ICE recorded more immigration arrests in Hamilton — a city of fewer than 65,000 residents — than anywhere else in Ohio. Arrests there more than quadrupled this year compared to the same time period last year, and nearly all of those arrests are tied to 287(g) agreements.
Jones said he expects to bring in $20 million in revenue this year from the agreement with the federal government. That money outweighs the daily protests outside the county jail. He estimates that 4,700 immigrant detainees have come through the jail in the past 18 months.
“A few of them get released from here and don’t get deported,” he said. “But it’s not many.”
Even with broader collaboration between federal immigration agencies and state and local law enforcement, ICE’s data shows that in July, half of arrests were of people with no prior contact with the criminal justice system. This percentage has grown along with the increase in arrests.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection have more funding than ever to conduct immigration enforcement, with more than $200 billion allocated since Trump took office last year. Congress approved about $70 billion of that funding in June. That cash infusion is greater than the fiscal 2026 budgets for the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals Service combined, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
ICE has so far used the money, which can be spent through fiscal 2029, to more than double its personnel, hire more charter flights for faster deportations and expand its technology to include “shock gloves” and robot dogs.
Cities are still targets for immigration enforcement, with less fanfare. Immigrant advocates in Chicago and St. Louis say calls to hotlines for legal services and to report ICE arrests increased dramatically in July.
The St. Louis Rapid Response Hotline has fielded nearly 9,000 calls for help dealing with immigration arrests over the past year, according to the Ashrei Foundation, which runs the hotline. Data collected during those calls shows more than half of immigration arrests in St. Louis and eastern Missouri were made by police during a traffic stop. The same pattern is evident in Chicago.
“They are quieter arrests,” said Alycia Jameson, a Chicago-based immigration attorney. “It’s a lot of suburbs. It’s a lot of traffic stops. It’s not the Midway Blitz Operations [in Chicago] — it’s not that. But the numbers are really up.”
