Mullin’s ICE Arrests 2,000 People A Day

NEWS & RESEARCH

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrested roughly 10,000 people over five days in late June 2026. Then, after a break for the July 4th weekend, ICE began arresting again at a rate of 2,000 per day. The surge followed a White House directive that set a new standard of 2,000 arrests a day and shifted 80 percent of the agency's personnel to arrest operations, calling for as many agents as possible to work seven days a week. This pace is roughly double ICE's tally of about 1,000 arrests a day earlier in the year, and it marks a shift away from the administration's high-profile raids under former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem toward quieter but more aggressive tactics. Since the Noem strategy drew sharp public criticism—especially following the killing of two US citizens by federal immigration officers in Minnesota—Noem's successor, Markwayne Mullin, signaled that he would keep the department out of the headlines while continuing to escalate the administration's mass deportation campaign. But on July 7, 2026, ICE agents in Houston killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in a traffic stop when looking for someone else.

SOURCES: New York Times |Business Standard | US News | NewsNation | Texas Tribune

ANALYSIS & OPINION

The Trump administration has cast the surge as an effort to remove "the worst of the worst," with DHS naming its targets as "murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists," but the arrests tell a different story. More than 70% of those currently in ICE custody have no criminal conviction, and among the roughly 10,000 people detained in late June was a Nigerian nun arrested on her way to church. That mismatch—between who ICE says it targets and who it actually arrests—is a predictable result of the quotas themselves. Federal law (§ 1357(a)(2)) permits a warrantless immigration arrest only when an officer has an individualized, fact-based reason to believe that a specific person is deportable and likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained. A directive to make 2,000 arrests a day inverts that requirement: when officers must hit a daily number regardless of who is available, they arrest first and justify later—if at all. During the June surge, that meant seizing whoever was easiest to reach. Agents stopped people in traffic and picked them up in public, while also turning routine immigration check-ins into traps, as ICE detained individuals who simply showed up for their appointments. They also arrested people inside immigration courthouses who were waiting for their hearings—directly violating a federal judge's orderbarring the practice. As Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, put it, "We're witnessing ICE, yet again, operate in a lawless and rogue fashion…our judicial branch has said that this agency must stop engaging in this lawless behavior, and they continue to do so."

SOURCES: New York Times | NewsNation | Common Dreams

HOW TO FIX IT

Federal action:

• Pass the ICE Accountability Act, which would create an independent watchdog commission to monitor ICE for constitutional and civil-rights compliance and report its findings publicly—countering the opacity that let this surge unfold largely unseen and giving Congress a way to hold the agency accountable.

• Pass the Hold ICE Accountable Act, which would establish an independent Special Prosecutor to investigate unlawful conduct by DHS and ICE. 

• Pass legislation prohibiting arrest quotas. Bar DHS from setting numerical arrest targets, or measuring its officers against them—removing the incentive to detain whoever is easiest to find rather than whoever the evidence supports.

• Pass a bill requiring documented, individualized justification for every civil immigration arrest. Under § 1357(a)(2), officers already need probable cause that a person is removable—but nothing requires them to record their reasoning, leaving the standard nearly impossible to audit or enforce. A documentation requirement would create a paper trail, making quota-driven, grab-whoever-is-easiest arrests far harder to carry out at scale. A version of this safeguard was recently in force in the Chicago area, where a court settlement in Castañon Nava v. DHS required agents to document the basis for each warrantless arrest on a person's official arrest record. A national law would make that protection permanent and universal.

• Pass legislation barring civil immigration arrests at courthouses and scheduled check-ins, except in narrow national-security or public-safety cases. Federal courts have already blocked such arrests—both nationwide and in New York, where ICE was accused of defying the order during the surge—but rulings can be appealed or reversed. A statute would make the protection permanent.

• Pass a bill requiring ICE to maintain a regularly updated public database of all its arrests and detentions—listing location, whether a judicial warrant existed, and the person's criminal-history status. While the ICE Accountability Act would rely on an independent watchdog's reports, this would put the raw numbers directly in the public's hands, letting journalists and researchers spot abusive patterns themselves. ICE currently only releases this data when groups—such as the Deportation Data Project—force it out through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. As ICE begins to run its operations with less and less visibility, public data would be a permanent check—surfacing what the agency would rather keep hidden.

State action:

• Pass laws like Washington’s SB 6002, which restricts license-plate-reader data and bars its use for immigration enforcement—denying ICE a tool it could use to intentionally stop vehicles driven by immigrants. This type of legislation is particularly important as many of the June surge’s arrests happened at traffic stops.

•  Bar ICE from state-controlled spaces without a judicial warrant. California’s AB 49 and SB 81 currently do so in schools and hospitals—shrinking the places that ICE can quickly grab people to meet its quotas.

Litigation:

• Litigation: Across the country, immigrants and civil-rights organizations are challenging ICE over the practice at the center of this surge: detaining people without first establishing a lawful basis for each arrest. In several jurisdictions, federal courts have issued injunctions that require ICE to justify such arrests or stop making them. Several of these fights are ongoing, including:

  • Ramirez Ovando v. Mullin: The ACLU has brought a class-action suit against ICE in Colorado over its practice of arresting immigrants without legal cause, alleging that the arrests are driven by the administration's quotas. A federal court issued a preliminary injunction barring such arrests unless agents first establish, as § 1357(a)(2) requires, a genuine basis to believe the person is deportable and likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained. When ICE continued regardless, the judge found in May 2026 that the agency had "materially violated" his order and required every arresting officer to be retrained or lose the authority to make warrantless arrests. The injunction remains in effect, and ICE has appealed it. Meanwhile, similar cases, such as Escobar Molina v. DHS in Washington, D.C., are also active. 

Even if the courts deem ICE's warrantless, quota-based arrests unlawful—as they have been doing—each ruling binds only its own jurisdiction, leaving a patchwork in which ICE's conduct may be illegal in one state but unchallenged in another. A national standard would have to be set by Congress.

• Mexico plans to file criminal complaints in the US over the deaths of 14 Mexican citizens in immigration detention centers and three others killed during US enforcement raids.

Legislation: S.3891 - ICE Accountability Act | H.R.8154 - Hold ICE Accountable Act | SB 6002 (Washington) | AB 49 (California) | SB 81 (California)