ICE arrests in Pa. and N.J. are surging, including people without criminal records

The number of people ICE arrested in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania surged around the time the agency reportedly implemented a 3,000 arrests-a-day quota in late May, according to recently released government data.

Arrests doubled from an average of 26 a day since President Donald Trump took office through May 21 to an average of 51 a day between May 22 and June 26 for the three states.

At the same time, the proportion of people arrested without a criminal record or pending criminal charges has exploded, up two-thirds since the directive to Immigration and Customs Enforcement was issued.

The data, current as of June 26, were published by the Deportation Data Project, a group of immigration-focused academics and lawyers that acquired the data from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The numbers include arrests by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division primarily responsible for the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants. They do not include arrests by other ICE divisions with more specialized areas of responsibility, nor arrests by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents that usually occur at ports of entry such as airports.

ICE arrested 4,969 people in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania since the start of the Trump administration through June 26.

Through the end of May, daily arrests varied from a low of 22 in April to a high of 34 in the last 11 days of January (the first 11 days of Trump’s term). The figure then doubled, going from 28 in May to 55 in the first 26 days of June.

ICE arrested 1,442 people across the region in the first 26 days of last month, higher than any month since Trump returned to office.

Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, wasn’t surprised by the numbers.

“That backs up what our members have been witnessing, and I’m responding to all over Pennsylvania,” Rivera said. “That just confirms what people are already living, and it’s horrifying.”

The abrupt shift coincided with a meeting, first reported by Axios, on May 21 at ICE headquarters in Washington. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser on immigration, reportedly demanded that the agency meet a quota of 3,000 arrests a day.

It seems to have had an effect locally. Between May 22 and June 26, ICE arrested 1,819 people in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, an average of 51 people each day. That’s twice the 26 arrests-a-day pace between the start of the Trump administration and May 21.

Recent polling has shown falling support for Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda. A CNN poll released Sunday, for example, showed 55% of Americans surveyed said the president has “gone too far” when it comes to deporting “immigrants living in the U.S. illegally,” up 10 points since February. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll released in early July showed that only 30% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% a year ago.

As the number of people arrested by ICE skyrocketed, the proportion of those arrested with only immigration offenses, such as entering the country illegally or overstaying a visa, drastically increased.

The proportion of people arrested with neither a criminal record nor pending criminal charges hovered between 27% and 32% from January through May before exploding to almost 50% in the first 26 days of June.

Since May 21, the day of the reported meeting, 47% of people arrested had neither a criminal record nor pending criminal charges. That’s about two-thirds higher than the 28% figure between the start of the Trump administration and May 21.

The ICE push for more arrests regardless of criminal history played out in South Philadelphia over the July 4 weekend when agents went to a home looking for one Guatemalan man with a pending criminal charge, then arrested four others who happened to be living there.

“It is one of the biggest changes from the previous administration,” immigration attorney Brennan Gian-Grasso, who is not involved in the case but previously led the Philadelphia chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told The Inquirer.

In past years, ICE would have arrested the one man who had pending criminal charges, but the other four would have been issued notices to appear in Immigration Court, according to Gian-Grasso.

In this case, all five were taken into custody and placed in deportation proceedings.

In a statement, an ICE spokesperson told The Inquirer that neither the field offices in Newark nor Philadelphia (whose area of responsibility includes Delaware) have been assigned arrest quotas.

“ICE ERO Philadelphia focuses on identifying, targeting, and apprehending aliens with criminal convictions, arrests, or [who] are otherwise identified as threats to public safety,” the statement read. “Additionally, we are arresting any alien who has violated U.S. immigration law like those who have illegally reentered the United States or were issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge. Being in the U.S. illegally is in fact a crime.”

The Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition’s Rivera predicted the record $170 billion for immigration enforcement in Trump’s recently passed “big, beautiful” government funding bill portended a further escalation of arrests.

“A lot of these tactics are not new,” said Rivera. “It’s just that ICE and other federal agencies are being pulled into immigration enforcement and are being given not only [permission] to do what they want to do, but now they’re trying to ramp up and escalate these operations.”

Inquirer staff writer Jeff Gammage contributed to this article.