There was a time, earlier this year, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests dropped locally and nationally. The massive immigration surge in Minneapolis had just resulted in the deaths of two U.S. citizens, sparking outrage. The Trump administration seemed to want to quiet things down.
No more.
While ICE has refrained from more Minneapolis-style surges, the agency began ramping up activity again in the spring and in recent months has arrested more people in Washington and nationwide than at any point in the last three years, according to figures released this week by the Deportation Data Project.
Based at the University of California, the project obtains ICE data through Freedom of Information Act requests. It is widely considered one of the best sources of information on the agency's activity despite flaws in the data received, such as duplicated information or details left blank in some cases.
The new, highly anticipated release adds five months of data. The last full month of data is July.
That month, ICE arrested roughly 700 people in Washington. That's up from about 230 in February and is higher than December's figure of nearly 530 arrests. By way of comparison, the previous December, before President Donald Trump took office, ICE arrested about 50 people — fewer than 10% of the latest number.
The vast majority arrested in Washington in recent months — roughly 70% in June and July — had neither criminal convictions nor pending charges reported by ICE, despite the Trump administration's refrain that it is focusing on immigrants who are dangerous.
National data follows the same trends.
The figures confirm what Washington's immigrant advocates have been seeing on the ground from Seattle to Shelton to Yakima.
Leslie Cushman, a coordinator of the Thurston Immigrant Solidarity League, said her group and others it works with have documented upward of 70 arrests around Thurston, Mason and Lewis counties since March. Probably June is when things started getting more intense," Cushman said.
The Trump administration this summer told ICE officials it wants to arrest 2,000 immigrants a day, according to new reports from outlets including The New York Times.
Mirroring observations of other advocates, Cushman said ICE is often pulling over people in vans with construction, painting or landscaping equipment. "They're taking workers," she said. Some were stopped on their way into the woods, where they pick salal, ferns and other brush sold to florists.
ICE has picked up others at gas stations or stores like Walmart and Home Depot.
Many of those detained were their family's breadwinners, Cushman added, talking as she was on her way to deliver diapers, beans, rice and other items to a couple of dozen families of people arrested by immigration officials.
"It's just been like nonstop," said Jamie Ortiz, a volunteer with Yakima Immigrant Response Network, who has also observed a pronounced uptick in arrests beginning in June. In the past week and a half alone, the network has documented 31 arrests, she said Wednesday.
Most wound up detained in the jail-like Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Malou Chávez, executive director of Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said her organization in July received more than 2,500 calls for help from detained people and their loved ones. That doesn't include emails.
She suspects one factor playing into the rise in arrests is the onset of so-called "mega" master calendar hearings in immigration court, which hit Seattle in June. Such preliminary hearings in deportation proceedings call an unusually large number of people at a time to appear before a judge — 120 at one hearing this week. People can fail to show up for a variety of reasons, including hearing dates changed with little notice. Missing a hearing typically results in a removal order in absentia.
At recent mega hearings, judges have issued as many as 30 removal orders, including for kids, leaving them vulnerable to a subsequent ICE arrest. "That tells me the administration is creating new pools of people they can go after," Chávez said.
Melissa Campos-Castañeda, a Federal Way immigration lawyer, said the uptick in recent ICE activity has created a demand for representation that's been "so chaotic and it's so overwhelming." She burnt out and last week decided to stop taking cases of detained people.
Even as the detained population has increased, some of those arrested have not found themselves locked up. That surprised Phil Neff, the Deportation Data Project's lead data analyst, when looking at the latest data. The Trump administration had previously been putting almost everyone arrested into detention centers, said the Seattle-based analyst.
While the data has no information about this, ICE may be funneling those released into a program that gives the agency alternative ways to monitor people while their deportation proceedings are pending, say by using ankle monitors.
That's what happened to a couple represented by Seattle immigration lawyer Vicente Omar Barraza. The couple had lost their case in immigration court and a subsequent appeal when they went to an ICE check-in this spring. Although they were still waiting for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in, Barraza thought they would likely be detained.
"I was shocked, he said at ICE's decision to opt for ankle monitors. A lot seems to depend on the discretion of officers, Barraza noted.
ICE may also be running out of detention space as it arrests more and more people. Its facility in Tacoma, with a capacity of roughly 1,600, held just shy of 1,460 people as of mid-August, according to members of Congress who visited then.
But Claire Trickler-McNulty, an ICE assistant director under then-President Joe Biden, said the agency can't always fill its detention centers to capacity because of issues like low medical staffing, quarantines or the need to put people considered high and low risk in separate units.
In time, ICE may go back to detaining almost everyone it arrests if the Trump administration makes good on plans to pour billions of dollars into new and expanded facilities.
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