The Deportation Data Project, co-directed by Berkeley Law Professor David Hausman, recently released a report analyzing immigration enforcement in the first nine months of the Trump administration.
The project, which tracks the government’s own records, continues to help journalists and policymakers understand what U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing.
The analysis shows that deportations from within the United States increased by a factor of 4.6 in the first nine months of the administration’s crackdown. During that period, ICE arrests quadrupled, and street arrests spiked by a factor of over 11 — with a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions.
The administration roughly tripled the number of detention beds for people arrested inside the U.S., an increase that’s partially the result of a massive infusion of funding for ICE and a drop in arrests at the border. Once arrested, the analysis finds, few were let out: Releases within 60 days of arrest, at 16% in the last six months of the Biden administration, plunged to 3% under Trump.
Voluntary departures by immigrants, typically rare compared to removals, increased by 21 times.
The analysis was widely covered by the news media, bringing hard numbers to a story that can get bogged down in anecdotes and funding debates.
“It’s been great to be able to test the government’s claims against its own data — and what we’ve found is that, as ICE has arrested more people, those arrests have become more and more random,” Hausman says.