What are the top 5 busiest ICE field offices by deportation numbers in 2025?
Executive summary
Publicly available, authoritative datasets and watchdog analyses show that ICE’s removals surged in 2025, but the sources provided do not publish a simple, verified “top five” list of field offices by deportation count for the calendar year — that ranking can be produced only by analyzing the Deportation Data Project / OHSS raw tables by field office (AOR) or ICE’s internal statistics releases (which identify 25 ERO field offices) [1] [2] [3]. Based on the reporting and datasets available, El Paso emerges as the clearest single hotspot; other likely high-volume offices include several Texas and major-city offices, but a definitive top-five with exact deportation totals requires direct analysis of the ICE/Deportation Data Project datasets rather than the narrative reporting alone [4] [5] [6].
1. Why the public record doesn’t simply list “Top 5” offices
ICE’s public-facing pages confirm that Enforcement and Removal Operations is organized into 25 field offices (areas of responsibility), but ICE’s summary statistics and many news reports focus on national totals and detention capacity rather than a tidy ranking by field office; the data needed to produce that ranking exist in OHSS/DHS and Deportation Data Project tables but must be processed by researchers to attribute removals to specific AORs accurately [2] [1] [3].
2. The one clear frontrunner: El Paso’s outsized role in 2025 removals
Multiple data-driven trackers and monitoring projects identify El Paso as hosting the largest ICE detention population in late 2025 — for example, reporting shows ERO El Paso Camp East Montana held the largest number of detainees in FY2026 to date, averaging 2,774 per day as of late November 2025 — a proxy signal that El Paso was a top locus for removals and transfers in 2025 [4] [5].
3. Other probable high-volume offices: Texas, large metro, and transfer hubs
Human Rights First and other monitors documented a sharp increase in domestic “shuffle” flights and transfers between detention centers as the administration scaled removals; that pattern concentrates activity at regional processing hubs and large detention sites — a dynamic that points toward Texas field offices (El Paso, San Antonio), major border and interior offices (Phoenix, Houston), and large-city offices tasked with interior enforcement (e.g., Chicago, New York) as likely candidates for the busiest offices by deportation count [5] [7] [8].
4. Case examples that illustrate but don’t prove rankings
Reporting about a mid-September 2025 operational move — the Chicago field office director noting an “entire plane” of 131 people sent to El Paso for processing — shows how apparent volumes in one AOR can be shifted to another for operational reasons, complicating any simple per-office ranking unless analysts trace individual-case identifiers across ICE’s datasets [9] [10]. Likewise, national trackers (The Guardian) aggregated arrest and removal totals — hundreds of thousands in 2025 — but did not break those totals into a public top-five by field office without underlying data filtering [11].
5. What is required to produce a definitive top-five list and why that matters
Producing an authoritative top-five requires analysts to combine the OHSS Persist dataset and the Deportation Data Project’s office mapping, reconcile AOR coding inconsistencies, and adjust for domestic transfers and processing anomalies noted in the data releases [1] [10] [6]. Advocates and journalists have done this for prior releases; where such an analysis exists it should be cited directly, but among the provided sources the processed per-office deportation counts are not excerpted in a single, citable ranked table [3] [10].
Conclusion — the best available, honest answer
The sources collectively demonstrate that El Paso was the busiest identifiable field location in late 2025 and that several Texas and major-city ICE offices likely rank among the highest by removals, but the precise top five by deportation numbers in 2025 cannot be declared from the supplied reporting alone without running the OHSS/Deportation Data Project datasets through an office-level analysis; researchers should consult the Deportation Data Project’s processed office files and the OHSS monthly tables to generate a definitive ranked list [4] [3] [1].