ICE Booked 46,000 People Into Detention in July — the Biggest Month of Trump's Second Term

Immigration and Customs Enforcement booked more than 46,000 people into its detention system in July, the highest monthly total of President Donald Trump's second term and a sign that the administration's deportation campaign is still widening rather than leveling off.

The July figure surpasses the roughly 43,000 bookings recorded in June, which had itself set the previous record. An average of about 1,500 people entered ICE custody every day last month, though some of them were first arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents and later transferred. As of this weekend, roughly 68,000 people were being held across the ICE detention network — below the record of more than 70,000 set in January, but far above anything the agency held before this administration.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem this spring, has framed the escalation as a matter of unleashing officers who had been held back. "We're turning up the heat on the streets," Mullin said. "We're out there working harder than we've ever had because we've empowered our law enforcement to do their job."

The administration says it has carried out 985,000 deportations and more than 1 million arrests since Trump returned to office. What the detention data shows is that the enforcement net has widened well beyond the border. ICE has begun making arrests inside airports through a partnership with the Transportation Security Administration, has run traffic-stop operations in several metropolitan areas, and has broadened the categories of immigrants eligible for arrest. The department also recently terminated Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Haitians.

The expansion has repeatedly forced the agency onto the defensive. The fatal shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during traffic stops triggered a national outcry and prompted ICE leadership to briefly pause vehicle stops — a moratorium that was reversed within days. A series of deaths in custody, including that of a 29-year-old man with acute leukemia who died shortly after being released, have drawn calls for independent oversight of the facilities.

Detention capacity is the practical constraint on how much further the numbers can climb. Congress funded a sharp expansion of bed space this year, and ICE has been contracting with county jails and standing up soft-sided facilities to absorb the flow. Immigration courts have not grown at the same pace. The backlog of pending cases remains in the millions, which means many of the people booked in July will spend months in custody before an immigration judge hears their case.

The politics are about to get sharper. The midterms are three months away, and polling this summer has shown public support for the deportation campaign softening as enforcement moves further from the border and closer to workplaces, schools and courthouses. Republicans have largely defended the numbers as proof of a promise kept. Democrats have increasingly treated detention conditions, rather than deportation totals, as the more effective line of attack.