The Guardian US has conducted an extensive analysis of immigration enforcement data since Donald Trump's inauguration, revealing the substantial impact of his administration's hardline approach to immigration policy.
Tracking the Trump Administration's Immigration Crackdown
Donald Trump campaigned explicitly on a platform promising mass deportation, and since assuming office, his administration has fundamentally reshaped immigration enforcement across the United States. The Guardian US has been meticulously monitoring these changes by analysing data published every two weeks by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The investigation tracks the number of individuals the administration has arrested, detained, and deported since January 2025. The newspaper has been archiving each release of detention management statistics and obtained older data releases from the Vera Institute for Justice to build a comprehensive picture.
How The Data Was Compiled and Analysed
The methodology involved scraping data from each ICE release and comparing totals with previous publications to calculate the number of people arrested, detained, and deported during each reporting period. ICE publishes detention statistics for the current fiscal year on a bi-weekly basis, providing regular insights into enforcement activities.
Arrest figures were sourced specifically from the ICE Initial Book-Ins by Arresting Agency and Month: FY2025 table. However, it's important to note that these arrest numbers may represent an undercount because ICE only reports arrests that result in someone entering ICE detention.
Detention totals came from the ICE Currently Detained by Criminality and Arresting Agency: FY2025 table, while deportation figures were extracted from the ICE Removals: FY2025 table. This multi-source approach ensures a comprehensive understanding of the administration's enforcement activities.
Important Data Limitations and Considerations
The Guardian US did not visualise the first data release of FY2025 due to complications with carryover data from the previous fiscal year. The initial release each year includes more than two weeks of arrests and deportations, making direct comparisons with subsequent bi-weekly reports challenging.
This careful approach to data analysis ensures that the figures presented accurately reflect the Trump administration's immigration enforcement actions without distortion from accounting anomalies or transitional periods between fiscal years.
The ongoing tracking of these statistics provides valuable insight into how campaign promises translate into actual policy implementation, offering transparency about one of the most significant shifts in US immigration enforcement in recent history.
