Fact check: What are the demographics of states with the highest and lowest ICE agent concentrations?

1. Why raw counts don’t tell the whole story — Texas and Florida dominate totals, but rates change the picture

Raw arrest and detention counts put Texas and Florida at the top: a Los Angeles Times aggregation lists Texas with 26,341 arrests, Florida with 12,982, and California with 8,460 in the reported window, and ICE’s dashboard records 291,668 arrests from September 2023 to July 2025. These totals are useful for scale but mask population differences and local enforcement posture. When adjusted for population, California falls to 27th in arrests per million residents, at 217 per million, reshaping the narrative that California is the epicenter of enforcement ^{[1] [5]}. The practical implication is that concentration of ICE activity depends on whether one measures absolute arrests, arrests per capita, or detainee inventories — each metric highlights different state-level enforcement realities and should be chosen to match the policy question at hand ^{[1] [5]}.

2. Detention inventories show a different geography — Louisiana and Texas stand out

Detention counts maintained by TRAC for FY2025 show Texas with 13,415 detainees and Louisiana with 7,493, while California’s detained population is substantially smaller at 3,801. This detainee geography diverges from arrest totals and signals how ICE operational capacity and detention bed usage are distributed across states ^[2]. Higher detention populations can reflect a mix of enforcement priorities, proximity to custody facilities, and intergovernmental arrangements with state or local authorities. The TRAC figures also report that 71.5% of detainees had no criminal convictions, introducing a distinct policy and legal dimension about who is held and why — an important demographic characteristic that raw arrest tallies don’t capture ^[2].

3. Demographics of those affected — race, nationality, and conviction status matter

Analyses from UCLA and other briefs find disproportionate impacts on Latino and Asian non‑citizens, suggesting that states with large immigrant communities will show higher ICE activity on several metrics. The Los Angeles Times and other sources indicate the states with the highest arrests have large Latino and immigrant populations, which correlates with observed enforcement patterns but does not fully explain variation across states ^{[1] [4]}. Another crucial demographic detail is that a large share of detainees lack criminal convictions, meaning enforcement reaches many civil immigration violators and low‑level offenders; this shapes the social and family-level impacts of enforcement and the public-policy debates about targeting and proportionality ^{[2] [4]}.

4. The politics and policy levers behind geographic variation — enforcement follows policy and access

State-level differences in ICE concentration map onto political alignment and local policies: Republican-dominated states and jurisdictions that cooperate closely with federal immigration authorities show higher absolute enforcement activity, while sanctuary jurisdictions and states with restrictive detention agreements register lower ICE operational footprints. Reports show Texas and Florida — politically aligned with vigorous federal enforcement post‑2024 — recording high arrest totals, while California’s per‑capita rate is lower, reflecting a complex mix of state policy, local cooperation, and enforcement resource allocation ^{[1] [3]}. Analysts and advocates interpret these patterns differently: some argue the distribution reflects legal violations and border proximity; others contend political choices and local cooperation shape where ICE concentrates its personnel and resources ^{[1] [3] [4]}.

5. What’s missing and why it matters — data gaps, timeframe limits, and policy implications

Public dashboards and briefings provide strong indicators but leave gaps: ICE’s dashboard does not directly report agent headcounts by state, complicating efforts to map “ICE agent concentration,” and many datasets offer overlapping but non‑identical windows (e.g., Sept 2023–July 2025 arrests vs. Jan–June 2025 arrest rates). The TRAC detainee counts and UCLA briefs add demographic and conviction context, but divergent timeframes and methods make direct comparisons imperfect ^{[5] [2] [6] [4]}. For policymakers and researchers, the takeaway is that multiple metrics — absolute arrests, per‑capita rates, detainee inventories, and conviction status — are all necessary to understand who is affected, how enforcement resources are deployed, and what reforms could alter the geography of enforcement ^{[2] [6]}.

Sources: ^[1], ^[2], ^[5], ^[6], ^[3], ^[4].