What are the county-level detainer and arrest totals for ICE in California, Texas and Florida in 2024?
Executive summary
Direct, county-by-county totals for ICE detainers and arrests in California, Texas and Florida for calendar year 2024 are not published in the reporting provided to this briefing; publicly cited datasets and dashboards note statewide volumes and concentrated county hot spots, and they point researchers to raw ICE dashboards and third‑party compilations for drilldowns [1] [2] [3]. Available secondary reporting and data projects agree that Texas, California and Florida were among the states receiving the largest shares of detainers and arrests in the period around 2024–early 2025, but the precise county‑level tallies for 2024 are only accessible by querying ICE’s dashboards or TRAC/Deportation Data Project files rather than in the news articles quoted here [4] [5] [1] [2].
1. What the sources actually provide about scale and allocation
Federal ICE dashboards released as of December 31, 2024 present arrest and detentions aggregates and are the primary official source for counts and trends, but the summaries published in news reporting and advocacy analyses draw on those dashboards or FOIA‑released datasets rather than printing exhaustive county tables in prose [1] [2]. TRAC and the Deportation Data Project have compiled and mapped detainers and arrests across thousands of law‑enforcement agencies and counties, and TRAC’s analyses emphasize that a small number of counties concentrate a large share of interior arrests — more than a quarter of recent ICE arrests occurred in ten counties and half occurred in an even broader cluster — signaling that county data exist but must be queried from those repositories [3] [4].
2. State rankings and relative shares (what can be stated confidently)
Multiple independent trackers and media reports concur that, in the timeframe spanning 2024 into early 2025, Texas, Florida and California accounted for the largest numbers of ICE actions: Texas is repeatedly identified as the single largest recipient of arrests and detainers, followed by California and Florida in various rankings; TRAC’s reporting states Texas received the largest number followed by California, with Florida often third [5] [4] [6]. National summaries cited in the reporting place the total ICE arrests in the first half of 2024 under the Biden administration at roughly 49,000, a figure used as a baseline in later comparisons [7] [8].
3. Why county numbers vary and why raw county totals matter
County totals for detainers and arrests shift dramatically based on local policies (287(g) partnerships, jail transfer cooperation, state mandates), funding flows and episodic large operations; reporting explicitly ties high county counts in Texas and Florida to jail‑origin pipelines and cooperative agreements, while California’s spike is often described as driven by episodic at‑large operations rather than steady jail transfers [6] [9]. That variation is why aggregate state numbers mask concentrated county dynamics and why TRAC and the Deportation Data Project publish detainer‑by‑detainer and arrest‑by‑arrest data — the precise county totals for 2024 are a matter of assembling those underlying records rather than reading them off a single news story [2] [3].
4. Where to get the county breakdowns and caveats about interpretation
Researchers seeking exact county‑level detainer and arrest counts for 2024 should query the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations dashboards (dataset released through Dec. 31, 2024) and the downloadable FOIA releases compiled by the Deportation Data Project and TRAC, which maintain detainer dashboards and per‑agency counts [1] [2] [4]. Any county totals extracted from those sources must be interpreted in context: a recorded ICE detainer is a federal request to local jail staff (not an automatic arrest outcome), and arrests recorded as ICE interior arrests may originate from transfers, jail handoffs, or field operations — distinctions that reporting highlights and that materially affect policy conclusions [4] [1] [9].
5. Bottom line for the 2024 county totals question
The publicly available reporting in this packet does not publish a ready list of county‑level detainer or arrest totals for California, Texas and Florida for calendar year 2024; however, it identifies the institutional sources that do (ICE’s Dec. 31, 2024 dashboards, TRAC’s detainer dashboard and the Deportation Data Project), and the secondary analyses consistently place Texas, California and Florida among the highest states by detainers and arrests, with concentrated county hotspots accounting for a disproportionate share of activity [1] [4] [3] [2]. To produce a county table for 2024 requires extracting and aggregating records from those datasets rather than relying on the narrative stories summarized here [2] [1].