U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has been ramping up raids, detentions and deportations across the country throughout the summer and now into the fall. The White House border czar Tom Homan said late last winter that if communities cooperated by allowing ICE access to individuals being held in local and county jails, he would pull back on community raids by armed and masked ICE agents that sowed chaos and death in Minneapolis and other cities.
But new analysis from The Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, finds that this hasn’t happened. In fact states which denied ICE access to their local jails have lower rates of immigrant arrests, while states that collaborated with ICE saw more immigration arrests. The researchers concluded that the Trump regime’s mass deportation project falters in places that resist.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Wanda Bertram, communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative, which analyzed the data. Here she summarizes their report which found that states and cities that block ICE access to jails decrease the number of arrests and deportations.
WANDA BERTRAM: There was, of course, in Minneapolis and in Chicago and some other places, some really blatant, some really explicit and shocking ICE action. After this happened in January 2026, Tom Homan, who was Trump’s “border czar” did a big press release and said, “We’re going to try to do a quieter, gentler take on immigration enforcement.” And part of what he announced was that if localities were willing to allow ICE access to their jails, being able to arrest people out of their county jails, then he promised that ICE would dial back the community level enforcement, so the raids on the streets and the raids at workplaces and things like that. It’s quite understandable why Tom Homan wanted so badly to be able to access local jails. It’s rather difficult for ICE to come anywhere close to meeting their arrest quotas that have been set down by the Trump administration if they’re not able to use jails to basically…
All of the information infrastructure that jails have more or less automatically shares people’s immigration status with the federal government, allowing the federal government to issue detainers that then the jails will honor, holding people 48 hours past when they would originally be released and then ICE can come and pick them up. This is D easier than going and doing a workplace raid or doing an arrest on the street. It’s you’re arresting someone who’s basically fish in a barrel. I want to be clear, this is not to say that… I’m not trying to play into the Trump administration’s claims that ICE is arresting the worst of the worst by targeting people at jails. These are often folks who are in jail pretrial, so they haven’t been convicted of anything. They may be there on charges that are very minor. The Trump administration has hoped to be able to pump its arrest numbers.
Because of this and because we’ve been trying in general to keep tabs on ICE and jails and their collaboration, we did this new analysis which we were just released earlier this week, looking at data from the Deportation Data Project, which pulls arrest records from ICE and looking at how the different types of arrests have changed over the last two years, month over month. And what we have found is that indeed collaboration with the police, both via detainers at jails and via things like 287G has really been instrumental to increasing their numbers. And 287G being the programs that facilitate formal cooperation between ICE and police agencies, typically paying police agencies for that work.
MELINDA TUHUS: If you could be more specific about what you found in terms of arrest numbers and was it different in different cities? And a lot of states, blue states with democratic governors and often democratic legislatures have really pushed back and said they’re not going to cooperate. So what’s been the result of that?
WANDA BERTRAM: The overall finding—and I think what everyone should know—is that nationally, ICE arrests of all types are going up and up and up. That includes ICE arrests at community locations like workplaces and at immigration court. That includes arrests at local jails. It includes arrests that are made by police who are explicitly working with ICE via 287G and also informally with ICE, even if they don’t have that kind of agreement. All of these types of arrests are on the rise. So the Trump administration is doing what it wants to do. Looking at different places that have different policies as regards cooperation with ICE, what’s interesting is that we see that states that have set down pretty strong protections and have said, especially states that have told police, “You cannot sign 287 agreements, you cannot hold people for ICE for an extra 48 hours even if they ask you to”—many states will make an exception if there’s a judicial warrant.
We’re talking about states like Illinois, like Oregon, like Connecticut, like New York, and we’ve seen that those states are actually, they have much lower arrest numbers. They’re able to keep arrests of all types lower, but particularly arrests out of county jails and arrests made with the help of law enforcement. So these prohibitions on police collaboration with ICE, they work and that’s the really good news. The more grim news is that there are localities that have tried to strike a cooperative or a middle way tone with the federal government and those states, those places, they’ve been duped into thinking that allowing ICE access to their courthouses, to their jails is going to reduce arrests and it really has not.
For more information, visit the Prison Policy Initiative.
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