How many green card holders have been arrested by ICE since January 2025?
Executive summary
Precise, authoritative data tallying how many lawful permanent residents (green card holders) ICE has arrested since January 2025 is not available in the reporting provided; government and NGO sources give totals for overall ICE arrests and document rising arrests of noncitizens and some high-profile cases involving green card applicants or long-term LPRs, but none of the sources offer a verified, aggregate count of arrested green card holders [1] [2] [3]. What is clear from the reporting is that ICE arrests surged across 2025, that enforcement practices broadened to include people with little or no criminal history, and that advocates and local lawyers have documented increasing instances of LPRs and green-card applicants being detained during routine immigration processes [2] [4] [3].
1. ICE’s overall arrest surge — the backdrop, not the breakdown
ICE’s arrest and detention footprint grew dramatically in 2025: several analyses and watchdog reports put the detained population and arrest totals far above previous baselines, with ICE detention rising from roughly 40,000 at the start of 2025 to about 66,000 by December and hundreds of thousands of arrests reported over the year in some datasets — figures that reflect agencywide activity but do not disaggregate how many arrestees were lawful permanent residents [2] [5] [4]. Independent researchers estimated roughly 220,000 ICE arrests between January 20 and mid‑October 2025, including a startlingly large share of people with no criminal record, but those breakdowns focus on criminal history and parole/status categories rather than a clean “green card holder” count [4] [6].
2. Documented LPR and green‑card applicant arrests — examples, not totals
Reporting from local outlets and legal blogs documents multiple incidents where green card applicants or long‑term LPRs were arrested during USCIS interviews, at airports, or in their communities — notably in San Diego where lawyers described arrests at green card appointments, and in Minneapolis and elsewhere where refugees and others with pending paths to permanent residence were detained amid new review policies — but those accounts are case series and do not provide a comprehensive national tally [7] [3] [8]. Legal organizations and immigration lawyers flagged that ICE has increasingly arrested people who had already undergone significant vetting, including some at the last step of the green card process, but the sources stop short of converting those anecdotal and regional counts into a verified national number [7] [9].
3. Trends that complicate counting LPR arrests
Several shifts in policy and practice make it harder to extract a clean “green card holder arrests” number from available data: expanded expedited removal rules and the removal of sensitive‑location protections broaden where arrests can occur, the administration directed surges in community raids and at‑large arrests, and NGOs report huge increases in arrests of people without criminal records — all of which muddy the distinction between undocumented noncitizens, applicants with pending cases, and lawful permanent residents in public datasets [10] [2] [6]. Public ICE releases and watchdog compilations frequently present arrests by custody status, conviction record, or broad immigration classification rather than by current lawful permanent resident status, limiting the ability to produce a verified LPR arrest count from the documents at hand [11] [6].
4. What the sources do allow — reasonable conclusions and limits
From the assembled reporting it is reasonable to conclude that arrests of people who are lawful permanent residents or who are at the green‑card stage increased and that incidents of detention at USCIS interviews and airports were documented in late 2025, but the sources explicitly lack a vetted national tally of arrested green card holders since January 2025; therefore a precise numeric answer cannot be supported by the provided material [3] [7] [12]. If a verified number is required, the necessary data would be ICE enforcement datasets disaggregated by immigration status (specifically current lawful permanent resident status), or authoritative compilations by researchers who have parsed ICE case‑level records — neither of which is present in the reporting supplied here [6] [4].
5. Alternative viewpoints and possible agendas in the reporting
Government and ICE statements emphasize criminal enforcement and public‑safety rationales for expanded arrests, whereas legal clinics, immigrant‑rights groups, and local lawyers highlight civil‑liberties harms, arrests of people with no criminal record, and procedural surprises such as USCIS‑adjacent detentions; these competing framings reflect implicit agendas — enforcement expansion versus immigrant‑protections advocacy — and both are evident in the sources examined [11] [2] [4]. Independent press accounts and law‑firm or advocacy briefings document the same phenomena through different lenses: one focusing on aggregate enforcement metrics and operations, the other on individual harms and legal irregularities, which explains some variation in emphasis without resolving the core absence of a national LPR arrest tally [1] [3].
Conclusion
The available reporting does not provide a definitive number for how many green card holders ICE has arrested since January 2025; the evidence shows a substantial nationwide rise in ICE arrests and multiple documented cases involving LPRs and green‑card applicants, but a verified, aggregate count by green‑card status is not present in the sources reviewed [2] [7] [3]. To produce a precise figure would require access to ICE’s detailed enforcement records or a data project that explicitly classifies arrestees by current lawful permanent resident status — neither of which appears in the provided materials [6] [11].