California recorded more than 5,300 ICE arrests involving people whose citizenship was listed as an Asian country since President Trump's second term began, accounting for over a quarter of such arrests nationwide during that period, according to the tracker. The state also logged more than 11,400 detention stints involving people in that category. The figures describe ICE citizenship-country fields; they do not, by themselves, establish a person's race, ethnicity or immigration status.
The figures come from a new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker launched by Stop AAPI Hate. The tracker uses ICE records obtained through public-records requests filed by the Deportation Data Project at UCLA and UC Berkeley, according to LAist. The Deportation Data Project says it documents how its datasets were obtained and their limitations and provides a codebook defining ICE variables and values. The project turned to litigation after ICE suspended routine public updates to its detention and removal dashboards in early 2026, as reported by WLRN. Cynthia Choi said Asian and Pacific Islander communities deserve better than to be an afterthought in the immigration crisis, per the outlet's reporting.
Enforcement Rising Faster Than National Averages
The tracker reports that ICE arrests involving people from Asian countries rose faster than enforcement against groups overall. Nationwide, arrests of people in that category peaked at 11,950 in July 2026, a 436% increase compared with a similar period during the Biden administration. Detentions rose 512% over the same comparison window, while deportations increased more than 1,100%. ICE did not break down deportation figures by state.
California accounted for the largest share of ICE arrests involving people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of Trump's second term, the tracker shows. The data involved primarily people from India and China, while people from Laos and Uzbekistan were arrested at rates disproportionate to their share of the Asian noncitizen population. Those comparisons should not be read as per-capita measures of impact or as evidence about race, because the records use citizenship-country fields. Separately, Hoodline reported that Laos issued travel documents for 145 individuals in early 2026 under expanded deportation agreements, a separate development involving long-term refugee-background residents and newer arrivals.
Fear Spreads Even Among Citizens and Visa Holders
Stephanie Chan noted that anti-Indian rhetoric has centered on H-1B visa holders and truck drivers, contributing to a climate in which Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders fear their immigration status will be questioned regardless of citizenship. A Stop AAPI Hate annual survey found more than half of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have felt the effects of the immigration crackdown, with many reporting fear of being arrested, detained or deported themselves.
Cynthia Choi compared the treatment of Asian Americans during the crackdown to the scapegoating the community endured during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pattern of fear reshaping public life has surfaced elsewhere in Hoodline's coverage this year, including reporting that canceled a Lunar New Year parade in Squirrel Hill and accounts of a Bay Area Japanese American coalition describing the sweeps as echoing wartime incarceration.
National Numbers Behind the California Snapshot
The California-specific figures sit inside a larger national count. Between January 20, 2025 and August 6, 2026, federal agents executed 21,078 arrests, 18,769 detentions, and 9,590 deportations of individuals from Asian countries across the country, according to Stop AAPI Hate. That is a fraction of the 555,805 arrests, 509,414 detentions, and 398,324 deportations recorded across all demographic groups nationwide during the same window, per the same tracker. Twelve individuals from Asian countries died in ICE custody between January 20, 2025 and August 23, 2026, the organization's records show.
Roughly 65% of Asian American residents were born outside the United States, the only major U.S. racial group that is majority foreign-born, according to demographic analysis cited by the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans. That demographic reality helps explain why federal policy shifts land disproportionately on Asian American communities compared with other groups. A survey by AAPI Data and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 64% of AAPI adults believe the U.S. is no longer a good country for immigrants, with roughly half saying they had altered daily routines or knew someone who had out of fear of enforcement.
Sanctuary Law Meets a Federal Directive to 'Flood the Zone'
California's ability to limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement does not prevent federal agents from making arrests. The California Values Act, or SB 54, enacted in 2017, bars state and local police from using public resources to assist federal immigration enforcement except in specified circumstances involving people convicted of serious or violent felonies, according to the ACLU of Southern California. Border czar Tom Homan said in May 2026 that the federal government would flood the zone with additional ICE officers in sanctuary jurisdictions that restrict local cooperation, according to KJZZ.
What the law and past agreements show
According to the California Department of Justice, SB 54 sets parameters for when state and local agencies may participate in immigration enforcement and requires reporting on certain joint task forces and transfers to immigration authorities. It does not bar federal agents from making arrests, and the records cited here do not establish how cooperation changed in each California county or how legal-aid demand changed after January 2025. Historical agreements involving Southeast Asian nationals are separate from the California arrest figures. The text of H.R. 7608 identifies a 2002 U.S.-Cambodia repatriation agreement and a separate 2008 U.S.-Vietnam memorandum of understanding, according to Congress.gov. Those agreements do not, on the evidence cited here, document changes since 2024 in travel-document requests involving Cambodian, Laotian or Vietnamese nationals or establish that they drove the current California totals.
That shift lines up with a broader national trend: federal immigration detention records analyzed by researchers in July 2026 showed that over 70% of people held in ICE custody nationwide had no criminal convictions, with civil immigration violations accounting for the majority of new arrests for the first time during the second Trump administration, as reported by CBS News. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who sits on the Republican-led congressional China committee, predicted Democrats would win the midterm elections and that the committee would shift toward celebrating Asian Americans rather than demonizing other countries.
