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After a three-month long delay, the longest in its recent history, the Department of Homeland Security on July 20 published detention numbers that show immigration enforcement grew again in the interior of the country under Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
The figures show ICE arrests at a record level, with the number of people in detention increasing again, notably reversing a dip from detainees with no criminal record.
The new data showing an uptick in enforcement activity follows backlash over recent fatal shootings, one in Texas and one in Maine, that again thrust the agency into the national spotlight. Earlier in 2026, the agency's high-profile operations in multiple cities led to calls for more accountability and transparency in immigration enforcement and a months-long stalemate over the agency's funding.
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Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the new numbers point to a change in immigration tactics but with similar results as before.
“The previous tactics were more visual, were more publicly controversial. They were more targeted in places and cities that were pushing against the Trump administration,” Ruiz Soto said. “Now the strategy is less visible ... at least until the recent death, but the outcomes haven't really changed significantly if you look at the bigger picture.”
Ruiz Soto pointed to the share of people detained without a criminal record, which has grown the most of any group under the second Trump administration, staying roughly even during Mullin's first months.
The new numbers show the average daily number of people booked into detention from ICE arrests reached over 1,300 in June — a 32% increase since April, Mullin’s first full month.
It’s also the highest of any month going back to 2021, according to a USA TODAY compilation of historical files.
While the increase is significant, the pace of removals has stayed roughly flat, with the total number of people in detention increasing after the reversal that followed the deadly shootings in Minneapolis in January.
A DHS spokesperson said in an email the agency has been delivering on President Donald Trump's promise to arrest and deport people with a criminal record. The spokesperson pointed to most ICE arrests being from people charged or convicted of a crime. The latest data shows detainees from ICE arrests without a criminal record made up 37% of the detained population, compared to the 6% in January 2025.
Data published July 20 marked over 100 days since the last update in April, pushing the average time between releases so far in 2026 to 42 days, nearly three times the historical schedule.
Through 2025, Trump’s first year back in office, and the four years before, ICE had been relatively consistent about publishing data roughly every two weeks, following a congressional mandate to do so.
“We were flying in the dark for months. That's a long time to really not know what the strategy was and what the administration was doing, and so it's welcome that they finally got around to putting this out here,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
The questions about transparency linger on other fronts too.
The recent back-to-back shootings have raised questions about why the agents were not wearing body cameras despite a promise by federal authorities to equip officers nationwide with the technology. In response, White House border czar Tom Homan on July 19 said ICE will require its officers to record vehicle stops with at least one body camera.
DHS typically publishes additional datasets that dive into other aspects of immigration enforcement in more detail, such as arrests and deportations. However, the agency hasn't updated those since the end of 2024, making the detention management data released this week the last accountability tool to track immigration enforcement, such as how many are detained and the share of people with and without a criminal record. It also tracks detention book-ins, which closely match arrests, but don't contain information like the location and if a local law enforcement agency was involved.
“It reflects a lack of transparency on their part that they're not forthcoming and regular with these releases that they're mandated to make,” Bier said of the detention data. “This high-level information only takes you so far, and you need a lot more information to make a good assessment of what's been happening.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Immigration arrests hit a new record, DHS says in long-awaited data
