How did local jail cooperation policies affect ICE arrest volumes across states in 2025?
Executive summary
Local jail cooperation policies in 2025 meaningfully shaped where and how ICE carried out arrests: states and counties that require or incentivize collaboration saw higher proportions of jail‑based transfers and overall ICE custody volumes, while jurisdictions that restricted cooperation shifted much of ICE’s activity into community-based “at‑large” operations [1] [2] [3]. Researchers and reporters agree this variation helped blunt the administration’s ability to meet mass‑deportation goals by denying ICE easy access to detained people, forcing more resource‑intensive field operations [4] [5].
1. How cooperation turned jails into force multipliers for ICE
Where county jails honored detainers, maintained notification practices, or entered 287(g) agreements, ICE could rapidly convert local arrests into federal custody, producing high jail‑based arrest counts and inflating state totals — a pattern visible in Texas and Florida, which require or actively promote collaboration and recorded disproportionately high jail‑origin arrests [1] [2] [6]. The Associated Press documented local laws and state incentives that expanded programs and produced spikes in ICE arrests in cooperating counties, noting that federal payments and many new agreements made some jails hubs for enforcement [7].
2. Sanctuary and restriction policies redirected ICE into the community
In states with statutory limits on law‑enforcement cooperation — including California, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and Oregon — the share of ICE arrests originating in jails “tanks,” and the majority of activity shifted to street, workplace, and home arrests, which are costlier and logistically harder for ICE [1] [3] [8]. UCLA and Prison Policy Initiative analyses link Northern California’s comparatively low per‑capita ICE arrest rate to state sanctuary laws and local resistance, demonstrating that cooperation restrictions reduced ICE’s easy pipeline from local lockups [8] [4].
3. The net effect on arrest volumes: mixed but meaningful resistance
Across states, the absence of local cooperation did not eliminate ICE activity, but it bluntly reduced the scale and efficiency of jail‑sourced arrests and therefore constrained the administration’s mass‑deportation ambitions; Prison Policy’s update concludes state and local limits “remain well behind” the administration’s goals by limiting custody flows [4]. National reportage and datasets show ICE increased arrests overall in 2025, but the distribution and intensity were shaped by where jails cooperated — states that refused cooperation saw lower jail‑origin counts even amid a national surge [5] [6] [9].
4. ICE adapted tactics: more at‑large operations and logistical tradeoffs
Faced with barriers to jail transfers, ICE redirected resources into community sweeps and tracking individuals outside custody, a tactical shift documented by The Washington Post’s analysis showing fewer jail‑based arrests and soaring at‑large arrests as field operations expanded — a change that raises costs, political visibility, and legal scrutiny for ICE [5]. Multiple analysts noted that when jails do not “piggyback” on routine arrests, ICE must invest more in surveillance, warrants, and manpower — slowing throughput and complicating the goal of mass, rapid removals [3] [4].
5. Geography, policy, and local politics interact
State statutes, county sheriff decisions, and electoral politics combined to produce heterogeneity: border states or large immigrant‑population states with cooperative counties (e.g., parts of Texas and Florida) yielded high per‑capita jail transfers, while politically liberal states with sanctuary laws produced pockets of dramatically lower jail‑origin arrests; in some places, Republican governors and sheriffs pushed cooperation despite statewide limits, revealing local leadership as a swing factor [2] [1] [7] [4].
6. Limits of reporting and open questions
Available public datasets and journalistic analyses flag data quality issues — ICE’s inconsistent location coding and incomplete records confound precise attribution of arrests to jails versus community settings — so while patterns of correlation between cooperation policies and arrest volumes are robust across multiple sources, exact causal magnitudes remain imperfectly measured [4] [1]. The competing narratives — ICE framing expanded field operations as strategic, critics calling them a response to local resistance — both appear in the record, and assessments must weigh DHS incentives, local budgets, and political agendas driving cooperation [7] [5].