Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in Texas are nearly three times higher than in California, despite California having a greater number of illegal immigrants, according to a review of federal data obtained by a research initiative led by researchers and lawyers from higher education focused on transparency.
Across Texas, ICE arrested more than 94,000 immigrants illegally residing in the United States between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, according to government figures released to the Deportation Data Project, a nongovernmental organization that obtained the ICE data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Approximately 5.7% of the estimated 1.65 million illegal immigrants residing in Texas were taken into custody in less than 14 months since President Donald Trump took office. The Texas illegal immigrant population figure is based on the Pew Research Center’s 2024 estimates of state populations.
In the blue state of California, ICE arrested approximately 33,500 people, or 1.9% of 1.8 million illegal immigrants, over that same time period.
A former immigration judge, Andrew Arthur, said the sharp contrast in arrests was due to “sanctuary” policies in California, which local and state elected officials put into place to prevent law enforcement from allowing ICE to transfer detainees in jails and prisons into federal custody. As a result, ICE has had to send additional personnel into communities to find specific people after they have been released from detention.
“It really suggests that local and state cooperation have a real impact on ICE’s ability to make arrests,” said Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.
In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said support from local and state police was “critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country” and added that the Trump administration has “had tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us.” The DHS disputed the accuracy of the numbers obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
The scale of arrests
Since Trump took office last year, ICE has arrested nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants, according to a recent CBS News report.
Graeme Blair, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and David Hausman, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, penned a recent report that concluded ICE arrests more than quadrupled from the final six months of the Biden administration to the peak of arrests so far under Trump in January.
“ICE street arrests went up by a factor of eleven — including not only arrests in neighborhoods, but also immigration court and at ICE field offices during regular check-ins,” Blair and Hausman wrote for the Deportation Data Project.
ICE is averaging 1,000 arrests per day, and although ICE and federal agencies, such as Border Patrol, have carried out flashy operations in Democrat-run cities that provide sanctuary to illegal immigrants, the numbers show that the Trump administration has had better luck making arrests in red states.
ICE has not responded to multiple requests for arrest data from the Washington Examiner. When asked for the data this month, the DHS shared arrest counts for three states.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Trump administration’s efforts to carry out the “largest-ever” deportation, as Trump had promised, had fared well and included arrests in sanctuary jurisdictions.
“Department of Homeland Security data indicates that the beginning of the Trump Administration has been hugely successful in arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens from around the country – including from dangerous sanctuary states,” Jackson wrote in an email.
“President Trump and his entire Administration remain committed to deporting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens no matter where they may reside,” Jackson said. “There is no sanctuary in the United States for illegal aliens – the safety of the American people depends on it.”
Why sanctuary cities are a challenge
When an illegal immigrant is arrested by local or state police, ICE will contact that jail or prison to request that the detainee be held and transferred to federal custody upon being released. Sanctuary jurisdictions will not honor a detainer request.
That has forced Border Patrol and ICE to go into communities and search for specific people after they have been released, taking up far more manpower and time than if the transfer had occurred in a secure jail setting.
Specifically, Border Patrol chose last year to send agents into sanctuary cities to help ICE search for specific illegal immigrants. Those cities included Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago; Minneapolis; New Orleans; and Portland, Oregon.
“When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
Although the Border Patrol operations in those heavily Democratic cities drew fierce pushback, there have been fewer than 7,000 total arrests each under Trump in North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota, Louisiana, and Oregon, despite having illegal immigrant populations of between 65,000 and 400,000, primarily due to the resources required for each arrest.
New York has one of the nation’s highest illegal immigrant populations at 650,000, but arrests there remained below 14,000.
Florida follows Texas’s lead
A spokesman for Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said the state’s high number of arrests was the result of partnership with the Trump administration from the start.
“Governor Abbott is proud to offer every necessary tool and strategy to aid in the Trump Administration’s deportation of illegal immigrants,” Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris wrote in an email.
“Texas is a law-and-order state, and it works hand in glove with the Trump Administration every single day to uphold the laws of this country,” Mahaleris wrote. “Texas will continue to assist the Trump Administration in arresting, detaining, and deporting illegal immigrants.”
Florida had an estimated illegal immigrant population of 1.15 million people. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) directed state police and law enforcement in all counties to assist ICE by referring over suspected illegal immigrants pulled over at traffic stops.
While the arrests there are not as high as in Texas, ICE has arrested 37,000 illegal immigrants in Florida.
DHS pushes back
The Washington Examiner asked ICE earlier this year to provide a breakdown of arrests by state but did not receive a response.
In a statement issued Friday evening, a DHS spokesperson said the Deportation Data Project numbers were “not accurate.”
The spokesperson said DHS personnel had arrested more than 11,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota, while the DDP reported fewer than 7,000 arrests. Similarly, the DHS touted 40,000 arrests in Florida as opposed to 37,000, according to the DDP.
In California’s case, the DHS count of 30,000 was below the DDP’s tally of more than 33,000.
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A spokesperson for the DDP told the Washington Examiner on Monday that its numbers came directly from ICE.
“ICE sent us these datasets in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit,” DDP’s Amber Qureshi wrote. “We posted the original data. These are ICE’s own records of who is arrested, detained, and deported.”
