For four years, DHS guidance told officers to focus on threats to national security, public safety and border security, and to weigh a person's ties and circumstances before arresting them. Executive Order 14159, signed January 20, 2025, ended that. It lets each enforcement agency set its own priorities, and the operative position since has been that there are none: anyone who is removable may be arrested, and the memo that kept officers away from schools, hospitals and churches was withdrawn the same day.
That is the policy. What follows is the practice, as far as public records show it.
The numbers
In late 2024 ICE was making about 300 arrests a day, a quarter of them "at large" outside jails, and just over half of those arrested had a prior conviction. In December 2025 and January 2026 the average was 1,264 a day, a rise of more than 300 percent, with over 800 a day at large at the December peak. Two of every three at-large arrests that winter were of people with no criminal record.
The daily detained population passed 73,400 in mid-January 2026, a record. On July 11, 2026, 65,765 people were in ICE detention, and 70.6 percent of them had no criminal conviction. June 2026 saw 43,138 book-ins. More than 30,000 people a month are being removed from detention; more than one in three deported in 2025 had no criminal record, and the shares tagged as suspected gang members or terrorists were 2 percent and 0.4 percent respectively.
Reported but never confirmed in writing: a demand from the White House and the DHS Secretary in May 2025 for 3,000 arrests a day, and an ICE agent's testimony in December 2025 to a verbal order of eight arrests a day per team in Portland.
The multiplier
Section 287(g) of the INA lets ICE deputize state and local officers. On June 30, 2025 there were 737 such agreements. On September 3, 2026 there were 2,430, across 39 states and two territories: 1,699 task force agreements, which put local officers on the street with immigration authority; 551 warrant service agreements in jails; and 180 jail enforcement agreements. A traffic stop by a county deputy in a task force county is, functionally, an ICE encounter.
The places
Courthouses. ICE rescinded its 2021 courthouse restrictions in January 2025 and, from May, paired dismissals with arrests outside the courtroom. On June 24, 2026 a federal judge in California vacated that policy nationwide. The ruling covers courthouses; it does not cover ICE field offices, where check-ins on orders of supervision and scheduled appointments remain a common point of arrest. Nor does it cover USCIS interviews.
Worksites. The raid on the Hyundai plant site in Bryan County, Georgia on September 4, 2025 detained 475 people, the largest single-site operation on record.
Homes. Covered in this site's piece on ICE at the door: administrative warrants, consent, and the May 2025 memo asserting forced entry against people with final orders.
The data
ICE finds people through records, and the records have widened.
- Commercial databases. A 2022 Georgetown study found ICE held driver's license data on three in four American adults and could locate three in four through utility records. The contracts with LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters run to roughly $22 million each.
- Tax records. An April 7, 2025 memorandum between the IRS and ICE shares taxpayer data under a criminal-investigation provision of the tax code. A challenge was denied a preliminary injunction and is on appeal.
- Medicaid records. A July 2025 agreement opened the CMS data repository to ICE; an injunction in August was narrowed in December to status, address, phone, date of birth and Medicaid ID for people not lawfully present, in 22 states.
- License plate readers. Flock's cameras serve more than 5,000 agencies; the company denies working with ICE, ran a Border Patrol pilot in 2025, and has lost at least 30 municipal contracts over the question.
- Vetting. All 55 million valid visa holders have been under "continuous vetting" since August 2025, and USCIS forms collect social media identifiers as of February 2026.
The practical implication is that the address on a driver's license, a tax return or a Medicaid file is the address ICE has.
Who is most exposed
In rough order:
- People with prior removal orders. A prior order can be reinstated without a hearing under INA 241(a)(5), and immigration fugitives are the stated first target.
- People with any criminal contact, including pending charges and minor offenses. The jail-based agreements make a booking a referral.
- Recent arrivals who cannot prove two years of presence, since expedited removal resumed nationwide on July 17, 2026.
- People with scheduled contact: ICE check-ins, USCIS interviews, and immigration court hearings, with the courthouse now the exception.
- Everyone else who is removable, which under the current guidance is a category rather than an afterthought. Two-thirds of winter at-large arrests were of people with no record.
What to do
Know which list you are on, and prepare for it. A person with a prior order needs a lawyer now, before any contact. A person with a criminal matter needs an immigration lawyer alongside the criminal one. A person here under two years needs the folder of proof. And everyone needs the family plan this site describes in its piece on preparing a household, because the arrests are no longer selective enough to plan around.