Which counties account for the highest concentration of ICE arrests and how are those arrests classified (jail vs. at-large)?
Executive summary
More than a quarter of recent ICE interior arrests are concentrated in ten counties and their surrounding areas, and roughly half of all such arrests occurred in a relatively small set of localities, according to TRAC’s county-level analysis [1]. Nationwide, ICE arrests come from two principal operational streams—transfers from jails and street (at‑large) arrests—and multiple reports show that about half of ICE’s arrests are of people transferred from federal, state or local custody while the remainder are arrests made in the community [2] [3].
1. Which counties concentrate the most ICE arrests: a short list and the headline numbers
TRAC reports that ten counties and their immediate surrounding locales account for roughly 28% of recent ICE interior arrests, and that fifty percent of arrests cluster in an even broader but still limited set of counties and adjacent areas [1]. Local reporting fills in some of those hotspots: Harris County, Texas, has the highest number of ICE detainer requests and is repeatedly flagged among the top counties for ICE activity in Texas [4]; San Diego and Imperial counties together account for nearly 5,000 ICE arrests since the start of the most recent administration’s enforcement surge, making them a major regional concentration in Southern California [5]; and Denver County led Colorado counties in arrests in one state-level analysis, followed by El Paso, Arapahoe, Mesa, Adams and Pueblo [6]. TRAC’s public datasets and detention tables provide the underlying county-level tallies for researchers seeking the full ranked list [7] [8].
2. How arrests are classified: ‘jail’ (custody transfers) versus ‘at‑large’ (street) and the balance between them
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) distinguishes arrests made after transfer from federal, state, or local custody (often facilitated by jail holds or detainers) from arrests executed on the street or in the community; historically ERO has frequently relied on transfers from jails to effect large numbers of removals [2]. Reporting and aggregated data indicate about half of ICE arrests nationally were of people transferred from custody rather than caught at large—The New York Times analysis put “about half” of arrests as transfers from custody, and TRAC/others show the centrality of jails to mass deportation [3] [9]. State and county variability is large: Iowa’s share of arrests coming from custody transfers was reported above 80% in one regional analysis, underscoring that in some places jail‑based referrals dominate ICE activity [3].
3. Regional patterns: Texas, California, the Upper Midwest, and local jail dynamics
Texas emerges repeatedly as a focal point: one analysis found roughly one in four ICE arrests occurred in Texas during the most recent enforcement period and named Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis counties among the top jails used for detainers [4]. In Southern California, San Diego and neighboring Imperial County represent a high-count cluster with thousands of arrests recorded in recent months [5]. In the Upper Midwest, Minnesota reporting noted large enforcement surges where many arrests were jail transfers and neighboring Iowa reported particularly high rates of custody-origin arrests [3]. State- and county-level patterns matter because local prosecutorial, detention, and detainer policies shape whether ICE can access people via jails versus seeking them in the community [9] [2].
4. Why the jail-versus‑street distinction matters for policy and advocacy
The split between jail-origin and at‑large arrests is not academic: reliance on jail referrals concentrates enforcement in places that cooperate with ICE detainers and creates leverage for state and local governments to curb mass deportations by limiting access, according to analyses that link jail cooperation to elevated removal flows [9] [2]. Conversely, expansive field operations produce visible community arrests that raise different civil‑liberty and public‑safety debates; media accounts from Denver to San Diego show how local incidents feed national scrutiny of tactics and targets [6] [5].
5. Data caveats, competing narratives, and what remains uncertain
Public datasets are improving but remain incomplete: TRAC supplies county tallies and detention tables but local outlets note gaps and ambiguous location codes (for example “FRD General Area” in Colorado data), and researchers caution that released snapshots can miss operations or misclassify geography [7] [6]. Different sources frame enforcement priorities differently—ICE emphasizes arrests of criminally convicted noncitizens while some watchdogs and local reporting highlight the large share of people without convictions in detention populations—so interpretation depends on which dataset and definitional choices are used [2] [8]. The sources provided do not include a single definitive, ranked national list in this packet beyond TRAC’s headline concentration findings, so precise numeric order of the top ten counties should be verified directly in TRAC’s downloadable tables for definitive ranking [1] [7].