Newly obtained federal enforcement figures show ICE agents took more than 800 immigrants with no criminal record into custody on an average day last month, the fastest such clip logged since Trump's second term began, according to data reviewed by CBS News. July marked the first month under this administration in which people held solely on civil immigration grounds, rather than because of a pending criminal case or conviction, made up the majority of everyone the agency arrested.
That escalation tracks with pressure from the White House pushing ICE toward a goal of 2,000 arrests per day, a mark the agency still hasn't hit even as its overall daily average, topping 1,580, set its own record for the term. For Latino communities across South Florida, greater Houston and the New York metro region, the shift means run-ins with federal agents are increasingly unfolding on sidewalks, at airport gates and outside routine check-in appointments, not solely behind bars.
A summer rebound after a rocky spring
Arrest totals had cooled off earlier in the year following backlash to a Minneapolis operation, a federal funding standoff, and turnover atop the Department of Homeland Security. This summer's climb hasn't relied on the large, headline-grabbing sweeps ICE staged in prior city-wide operations. Instead, agents have leaned on traffic stops, airport encounters and arrests made at scheduled immigration check-ins, tactics that put them in frequent contact with immigrants carrying no U.S. criminal history whatsoever.
Administration officials keep describing their targets as the worst of the worst, yet the government's own figures tell a more complicated story. People convicted of violent offenses, using the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics definition, account for roughly 6% of everyone booked into ICE custody since Trump returned to office, and just 4% of July's arrests specifically, according to enforcement records compiled by the Deportation Data Project, a research effort jointly run out of UC Berkeley and UCLA that draws on federal data ICE itself supplies. A DHS spokesperson pushed back on a similar Texas-focused breakdown compiled by the Houston Chronicle, calling the non-criminal label misleading and estimating that nearly seven in ten of the agency's Texas arrests involve people the department broadly classifies as criminal, a wider category than violent convictions alone that DHS did not spell out further.
Separately, CBS News reported that a DHS spokesperson defended the wider strategy in similar terms, arguing that many people counted as non-criminal "are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more" who simply lack an arrest record inside the United States.
Miami logs nearly 6,000 bookings in a month
South Florida registered some of the sharpest increases nationwide. Street-level arrests made outside jails and prisons climbed to a monthly average of 715 across June and July in greater Miami, up sharply from roughly 115 over the prior six months. Jacksonville's shift was even steeper in percentage terms, rising from about 15 arrests a month to 165, a change tied in part to a Florida statute compelling local police departments to work with ICE.
Separately, NBC6 South Florida reported ICE logged close to 6,000 bookings across greater Miami in July alone, with roughly 4,300 people still held in custody as of July 26. The timing lands as deportation protections covering upward of 300,000 Haitian nationals, many settled in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, have already lapsed rather than merely approaching their end: a D.C.-based federal judge cleared the way on Aug. 5, and the government carried out its first deportation flight to Haiti less than three weeks later, sending 160-plus people to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien because Port-au-Prince's airport remains too dangerous to use. Advocates say that timeline, layered onto the arrest surge, has left South Florida's Haitian community confronting enforcement that is already underway, not still on the horizon.
Houston's Latino East End feels the shift firsthand
Texas mirrored the national pattern, with community-level arrest totals roughly tripling this summer in both El Paso and Austin. In Houston, the pivot from jailhouse pickups toward street encounters turned deadly when federal agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national with no criminal record who had lived in the city for 35 years, during a traffic stop in the heavily Latino East End neighborhood. Neighbors near the scene told reporters that sightings of ICE agents around the area had become noticeably more frequent in the weeks leading up to the shooting.
Immigration attorneys in the city point to routine check-ins as a particular danger point. Agents have increasingly zeroed in on immigrants who show up for scheduled appointments to keep their pending cases active, according to Houston Chronicle reporting, since those individuals are, as Houston-based immigration attorney Javier Rivera put it, "easy pickings for arrests."
Newark, Denver and the sanctuary-city question
The surge wasn't confined to the Sun Belt. Community arrests in Newark, New Jersey, and Denver each roughly doubled over the same stretch, while San Ysidro, on the California side of the border crossing with Tijuana, saw activity jump sixfold. Notably, the rise wasn't concentrated in jurisdictions the administration brands sanctuary cities: those areas saw street arrests climb 27% against their own six-month baseline, compared with a 50% jump everywhere else, a pattern that complicates officials' argument that sanctuary policies alone are driving aggressive enforcement elsewhere.
A pipeline built to keep growing
At least 45,300 of the arrests ICE logged over those two summer months, nearly half its total, took place in communities rather than behind bars, with roughly 12,700 more stemming from 287(g) agreements that deputize local police to make immigration arrests on the agency's behalf. That program now covers more than 1,850 agencies nationwide, backed by $1.15 billion in federal funding running through September 2027, meaning the reach of street-level enforcement is positioned to keep expanding into the fall.
For diaspora communities from Doral to Newark to Houston's East End, that trajectory points toward more frequent encounters in everyday spaces — commutes, airport terminals, courthouse hallways — even as officials continue to insist their focus remains on immigrants with serious criminal histories.
