How did ICE daily arrest rates vary month‑by‑month in 2025, by state and county?
Executive summary
Daily ICE arrest rates rose sharply after the January 20, 2025 inauguration, accelerated again in late May when White House staff pushed for scaled-up community raids, and then showed regional variation with states such as Texas, Florida and California accounting for the largest shares of arrests [1] immigration-2107629" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[2]. National monthly totals and rolling averages indicate peaks in summer and into October 2025—with some reporting more than 30,000 arrests in a month—followed by signs of cooling in August, but county‑level month‑by‑month detail in the available public reporting remains incomplete [3] [4].
1. January–May: an early uptick concentrated in enforcement corridors
Arrest activity climbed beginning with policy shifts around the January inauguration, producing a clear upward trend in daily arrests reflected in 14‑day and seven‑day rolling averages used by several analysts, and by May the pattern showed steady increases driven by both jail transfers and at‑large community operations [1] [5]. State‑level analyses for the February–early June window (UCLA) standardize arrests per 1,000 noncitizen immigrants and show pronounced state variation, signaling that the national rise was not evenly distributed but concentrated in states with larger foreign‑born populations and cooperative local jails [6].
2. Late May–June: the “escalation” and a summer surge
Reporting cites a late‑May push by White House staff to escalate community raids with public targets of roughly 3,000 arrests per day; analysts smoothed daily series with 14‑day averages to detect that second, sharper rise beginning in late May and into June 2025 [1]. Nationally, press and NGO tracking documented a more than doubling of arrests in some regions compared with the prior administration’s final months, and state maps for January–June place Texas, Florida and California as the top absolute contributors to that surge [2] [7].
3. State patterns: per‑capita and absolute leaders
Multiple independent compilations place Texas at the top in both absolute totals and per‑capita arrest rates, with Florida and California also prominent; one per‑100,000 resident ranking lists Texas (86.6), Florida (55.9) and several interior states with elevated per‑capita rates including Utah and Arizona [7]. Analysts note that border proximity, large foreign‑born populations and local corrections cooperation—county jails sending detainees into ICE custody—help explain why those states dominated monthly arrest counts [7] [8].
4. County and facility signals: jails as major funnels, but county monthly series limited
Reporting flags particular counties and jails—Harris County and jails in Dallas, Bexar and Travis counties—as leading sources of ICE detainers and transfers, and single facilities (for example, Adams County Detention Center in Mississippi) appeared as high‑population sites during 2025, but the public accounts reviewed do not supply a complete, month‑by‑month arrest time series for each county to reproduce precise daily rates at the county level [8] [7]. Analysts and FOIA‑derived datasets (Deportation Data Project, Vera, TRAC) permit county linkage in some cases, but the summaries cited stop short of providing consistent county‑by‑month daily‑rate tables in the material available here [9] [10].
5. Autumn dynamics and caveats: peak months, partial declines, and data limits
By mid‑October 2025 monthly arrest rates were reported above 30,000 in some accounts, and detention populations reached unprecedented sustained highs from June onward, exceeding prior peaks—yet there are signs of moderation in early August where daily averages were lower than July and down about 17.7% from June according to TRAC’s mid‑August note [3] [10] [4]. Important caveats: ICE publishes biweekly detention and arrest tables and third‑party groups (Deportation Data Project, Vera, Prison Policy, UCLA) reprocess these with rolling averages and population denominators, so month comparisons depend on smoothing, choice of denominator (per capita vs per noncitizen), and the exact date boundaries used; the sources available here document clear state‑level monthly shifts but do not provide a complete, standardized public ledger of every county’s month‑by‑month daily arrest rate for all of 2025 [11] [9] [6].