ICE arrests skyrocket in Florida and Texas, Trump is losing the immigration war in California due to huge resistance
Florida – Texas and Florida have made a lot more arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement than California since President Donald Trump stepped up his immigration enforcement. But the figures don’t tell the entire picture.
The Times looked at federal data and found that Texas had 26,341 ICE arrests in the first five months of Trump’s second term. This was almost a quarter of the national total. Next was Florida, which had 12,982 arrests, and then California, which had 8,460. Texas nonetheless made about twice as many arrests than California, even in June when heavily armed federal agents were doing extremely armed sweeps in Los Angeles.
When you look at the population, the gap is significantly bigger. Texas had 864 arrests for per million people, which is approximately four times the rate in California, which had 217. Florida and a few other Republican-led states, such as Arkansas, Utah, and Arizona, also had far higher arrest rates per person. Analysts believe the difference is because ICE and local law enforcement have worked closely together for years in conservative states, where officers often turn over unauthorized immigrants who are in jail or prison.
California, on the other hand, doesn’t allow this kind of collaboration under its “sanctuary” regulations. Sharing detainee information with federal immigration officers only happens when someone is convicted of a serious criminal. That restriction has stopped ICE from getting inside a lot of local jails, which has forced agents to make more arrests on the street. The numbers show that only 7% of California’s ICE arrests this year came from prisons or jails. In Texas, it was 55%, and in Florida, it was 46%.
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Even though these structures are different, California nonetheless witnessed one of the biggest increases in ICE action in the country. Between late January and late June, the number of arrests in the state went up by 212%, while the number of arrests in the whole country went up by 159%. A lot of the rise happened in LA and the counties around it, which made up around 60% of all arrests in California during that time. Arrests in the area went up from 463 in January to more than 2,100 in June.
The street-based approach in California changed who was being held. In the first few months of the year, two out of three people who were detained had a criminal record. By June, that number had reduced to just 30%. Activists and groups that support immigrants claim this shows that ICE was going after more people and targeting them based on their looks, language, or where they lived instead of their criminal records.
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Organized resistance in LA changed the way the law was enforced even more. Community patrols, which often ran from dawn to late at night, kept an eye on ICE agents, confronted them, and informed people about raids. Sometimes, these actions made ICE leave neighborhoods. Organizers argue that this kind of opposition is one reason why California’s arrest rate is lower than in many other states.
In June, the situation got worse when Trump sent National Guard troops and Marines to the LA area to “protect” federal buildings. But in July, a federal court temporarily prohibited immigration authorities in Southern and Central California from going after people they didn’t have a good reason to believe were in the country illegally. The Ninth Circuit sustained that order, which led the government to seek the Supreme Court to lift it.
The verdict made arrests in Los Angeles slower, but federal investigators have nevertheless been doing selective raids, like the ones they did at many Home Depot stores recently. Officials say that sanctuary policies will simply make enforcement at work sites more harsh.
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Experts argue that California’s experience shows how important immigration enforcement is to the administration, even though it is hard to do logistically. Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute said that ICE could make more arrests “more safely, more quickly, and more efficiently” in other states. However, California has become a test case in the administration’s ongoing fight over immigration policy.
