U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 49,571 people in July 2026, the highest single monthly arrest total of President Trump's second term, according to new figures. Texas and Florida alone accounted for nearly 20,000 of those arrests, a reflection of how deeply state and local law enforcement in both states have been woven into federal deportation efforts.
The July total marked a 15% jump from the 43,021 arrests recorded in June 2026, and a 70% increase from the roughly 29,241 arrests in February 2026, according to MySA, whose analysis by reporter Rebecca Santana drew on ICE arrest data provided to the University of California, Berkeley's Deportation Data Project. ICE arrests had hovered at a little over 8,000 in the month before Trump took office, and they exceeded 40,177 in December 2025 before climbing past 43,000 in June 2026. The steady month-over-month climb shows an agency operating at a scale unseen earlier in the administration.
Much of that growth traces back to money and staffing. Congress infused ICE with billions of dollars last summer, and the agency has since hired 12,000 new deportation officers and investigative agents, according to the same MySA report. The Trump administration also loosened restrictions on where and who ICE could arrest during its first year in office, removing constraints that had previously limited enforcement in certain locations and against certain individuals.
Texas and Florida's Outsized Role
Texas and Florida's cooperation with ICE runs through 287(g) agreements, a federal program authorized under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, added by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Those agreements permit state and local law enforcement officers to perform specific federal civil immigration functions under ICE direction, effectively allowing local and state police to operate as arms of federal immigration enforcement, as explained by the American Immigration Council.
That local-federal pipeline has already surfaced in cases Hoodline has covered directly, including a Texas dad and his 9-year-old held for a month after a state trooper stop, and a Florida father taken into custody by Border Patrol while his son remained at sea. Texas also housed the largest number of ICE detainees of any state as of July 2026, at 16,450, according to tracking data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, followed by Louisiana, California, Georgia, and Florida.
Who Is Actually Being Detained
Despite administration rhetoric emphasizing dangerous criminal offenders, TRAC's data shows ICE held 65,765 people in immigration detention as of July 11, 2026, and 70.6% of them had no criminal convictions. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted by researchers at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, found that daily ICE arrests averaged 952 during the first 14 months of Trump's second term — a 214% surge over pre-inauguration baselines — even as the criminal conviction rate among arrestees dropped to 34%.
The same Berkeley study found ICE has shifted tactics toward direct “community arrests,” which rose from 17% to 47% of all ICE arrests nationwide, with particularly sharp spikes in sanctuary jurisdictions including California, New York, Seattle, and Chicago. That tactical shift helps explain why arrest volume has climbed even as enforcement moves further from jail transfers and deeper into neighborhoods and workplaces.
Legal Questions Around Warrantless Entry
ICE's administrative arrest warrants, known as Form I-200, are issued internally by Department of Homeland Security officials rather than by independent judges. That distinction matters constitutionally: the Cato Institute notes these warrants do not confer judicial authorization to enter private residences without consent under Fourth Amendment protections, a legal tension that has followed ICE's expanded street and home enforcement tactics throughout the surge.
Mullin's Rocky Tenure at DHS
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pledged during his confirmation hearing to keep ICE out of the headlines, but the July arrest figures show he has not shifted the agency away from Trump's vision for mass deportations. His tenure has instead been marred by fatal shootings of immigrants in encounters with ICE officers, and he faced backlash from conservative immigration hardliners in August after advocating for adjustments to guest-worker visa programs to address labor shortages alongside mass deportations, a rift Hoodline detailed in its report on MAGA turning on Mullin.
The financial scale behind the surge is substantial. Following a $75 billion funding boost in summer 2025, Congress approved an additional $38 billion spending package for ICE in June 2026, bringing cumulative new immigration enforcement appropriations to roughly $70 billion within a single year. Department of Homeland Security estimates put the cost of enforced removal flights at approximately $18,245 per person, compared to roughly $5,100 per person for voluntary self-deportations arranged through the government's CBP Home mobile app, a gap Hoodline examined in its coverage of the first deportation flight to Haiti since the end of Temporary Protected Status.
ICE's reach now extends well beyond physical detention. The agency's Alternatives to Detention programs were monitoring 183,181 individuals and families nationwide as of July 11, 2026, with the San Francisco area office leading the country at 20,804 monitored individuals, according to TRAC. Combined with the record July arrest figures, the numbers point to an enforcement apparatus expanding on nearly every front — funding, staffing, tactics, and geographic reach — even as questions persist about who exactly is being swept up along the way.
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