The Briefing
- ICE has logged 356,389 removals for fiscal year 2026 through July 11 — the most recent tally the agency has made public — putting it within striking distance of the modern-era record of 438,421 set under President Obama in 2013.
- Of the 65,765 people currently sitting in ICE detention, 70.6% have never been convicted of any crime, according to an independent analysis of the agency's own data. ICE gets to "roughly 60% have a record" only by folding in unresolved pending charges alongside actual convictions.
- Arrests have hit new monthly highs for three consecutive months, topping 50,000 in both July and August, even as independent researchers find that a majority of the people swept up in that surge have no criminal history at all — not even a pending charge.
ICE has removed 356,389 people since October 1, closing in on a deportation record that has stood since the Obama era. That is the figure the Trump administration leads with when it talks about immigration enforcement this year. It is also just one slice of a much messier data set.
The people behind that headline number are overwhelmingly from Latin America, and the way officials describe them — as violent offenders or as working parents swept up in an expanding dragnet — shapes both the political argument over enforcement and everyday life in immigrant communities from Maine to Texas.
The figure DHS keeps repeating
ICE's own enforcement workbook, as first reported by ABC News, puts fiscal year 2026 removals at 356,389 as of July 11 — still the most recent window the agency has released publicly, and the operative number as this story publishes. That already exceeds the 319,980 removals tallied for all of fiscal year 2025, according to independent tracking of ICE data by researcher Austin Kocher.
At the current pace, fiscal 2026 could challenge the all-time high of 438,421 removals carried out in fiscal 2013 under President Obama — a comparison the administration has leaned on publicly. Mike Howell, who leads the Trump-aligned Oversight Project and has a separate lawsuit pending to obtain more granular removal figures, told ABC News the total is "larger than Obama in absolute terms" — before adding that, relative to today's larger unauthorized population, the comparison flatters the administration less than it might appear.
Arrests keep climbing — and so does the criticism
Monthly enforcement numbers have accelerated well beyond removals alone. ICE booked roughly 43,000 people between its own agents and Customs and Border Protection in June, then broke its own arrest record twice more: 50,208 in July and 50,925 in August, according to DHS figures reported by the Washington Examiner. Secretary Markwayne Mullin called August's total the agency's third consecutive monthly record. ABC News has reported that administration officials are aiming for 2,000 arrests a day.
One data set, two competing stories
DHS's public messaging leans almost entirely on violence and gang affiliation. Its most recent "Make America Safe Again" release, published Sept. 2, highlighted the deportation of alleged members of MS-13, the Latin Kings and the 18th Street gang, several with prior convictions for burglary, assault or drug trafficking. Mullin framed the removals as proof the agency is targeting the country's most dangerous residents, saying ICE "made our country safer by deporting illegal alien gang members" that week.
ICE's own detention numbers complicate that picture. Of the 65,765 people currently held, 19,329 have an actual criminal conviction on record — about 29% — while another 20,247 face pending charges that haven't been resolved in court. Add those two groups together and the agency arrives at its "roughly 60% have a record" talking point. Separate convictions from unproven charges, the way TRAC Immigration's ongoing analysis of ICE's own data does, and the picture flips: 46,436 people, or 70.6% of everyone in custody, have never actually been convicted of anything.
That gap has been widening for months, not narrowing. A detailed review of Deportation Data Project records found that people who had never been charged with or convicted of anything made up roughly 47% of ICE's arrests in June and crossed the halfway mark in July, the first month of the second Trump administration in which most people picked up by ICE had never been accused of a crime at all. Early August data reviewed by the same researcher showed only about one in five arrests that month involved someone with an actual conviction, the smallest share recorded since the current administration took office. DHS has not disputed the underlying numbers; it has instead accused researchers using the data of cherry-picking to build what agency officials call a false narrative.
The communities absorbing the numbers
Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras have long accounted for most ICE removals, and fiscal year 2024 was no exception: Mexico alone received 87,298 of that year's roughly 270,000 deportees, with Guatemala adding another 66,435 and Honduras 45,923, according to ICE figures reported by Telemundo. A third-party tracker compiling FY2026 removals data puts Mexico's current share at roughly 38% of the total — a figure ICE itself has not broken out in its public releases.
Two men, two shootings, one violent week
The human cost of the surge came into sharp focus in mid-July, when ICE agents fatally shot two Latin American men within six days of each other. On July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed 26-year-old Colombian national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero after agents tried to stop the vehicle he was driving. Sen. Angus King, who was briefed directly by Mullin afterward, said the secretary described Durán Guerrero as having "weaponized" the car before he was shot. King later revealed something Mullin had omitted from that first account: agents weren't even there for Durán Guerrero. He wasn't the person named on the removal order, and Mullin's own version of events shifted on that point within hours.
Six days earlier, on July 7 in Houston, an ICE agent shot and killed 52-year-old Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was behind the wheel of a van carrying coworkers to a job site that morning. DHS later acknowledged to reporters that Salgado Araujo simply resembled a different man agents had under surveillance and was not their intended target.
What still doesn't add up
A far larger figure occasionally floated by DHS officials — that deportations under this administration are approaching or will exceed 1 million, with millions more people self-deporting — is nowhere in ICE's own removals workbook. In a June statement, Secretary Mullin projected the full-year total could top 1 million, citing internal figures well above what ICE has since published for FY2026 alone. DHS's self-deportation claims have shifted just as dramatically from one press release to the next — climbing from roughly 500,000 in one fall 2025 estimate to 1.6 million, then to nearly 2.2 million within a matter of months — prompting a research group at the Center for Migration Studies to describe the larger self-deportation totals as unsupported by evidence. None of it squares with TRAC's tally of confirmed Trump-era removals, which stood at 290,603 as of the agency's most recent report. Until DHS publishes data backing the bigger numbers, LatinTimes is treating them as unconfirmed rather than reporting them alongside the sourced 356,389 figure.
Three weeks remain in fiscal year 2026. ICE has not released a removals count more recent than July 11, and the final year-end tally won't be locked in until after Sept. 30.
