Misleading Ice data ‘laying groundwork’ for mass deportations, advocates say

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested more than 8,200 people between 22 January and 31 January, according to data the department is releasing on social media.

The figures are the first public data into the new Trump administration’s promised mass-deportation efforts and are part of a new tactic from the administration to promote its efforts to fulfill Donald Trump’s campaign promise to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The posts highlight the daily number of arrests and detainers, which are requests to local law enforcement agencies to hold someone so that Ice can detain them.

As of 10 February, the agency hasn’t released any new figures in 10 days. But on average, the administration has been arresting 826 people a day since the president was inaugurated on 20 January.

If Ice continues to arrest people at this rate, the administration is on track to arrest nearly 25,000 in its first 30 days, more than any other month in the last 11 years.

The agency has been releasing the daily figures across its different social media profiles, mixed in with photos of Ice agents arresting people and a series of digital fliers with the names and alleged criminal histories of people the agency has detained, some tagged with the motto “The Worst First”.

Enforcement update from Ice describing the number of arrests and detainers on 31 January. Photograph: X

But the data that Ice is releasing paints a misleading picture of what the administration is doing, advocates say.

“There’s not very much detail,” Noelle Smart, principal research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, said. Without access to the data Ice is aggregating from, it’s impossible to verify what the agency is putting out.

“Data transparency is really critical, not just to have the statistics that the government is putting out, but to actually be able to independently validate those,” Smart said.

The recent arrest data from Ice does not say where the arrests took place, or how many people the federal agents arrested had prior convictions, data points necessary to understand whether the administration is actually arresting the so-called worst first.

Ice has put out misleading data in the past. According to a July 2024 US Government Accountability Office, Ice undercounted the number of people in immigration detention by tens of thousands. And recent reporting on highly publicized raids throughout the country have found that Ice exaggerates the number of criminals who are being arrested, while sometimes sending in large numbers of operatives in tactical gear from a number of agencies, even using military-style vehicles and accessories, drawing protests in some places.

In years past, most people arrested by Ice did not have felony criminal convictions. Though detailed statistics on arrestees is not available for 2025, between October 2022 and November 2024, 78% of people arrested by the agency had a misdemeanor conviction or no conviction at all.

Only 21% of people had a felony criminal conviction, a Guardian analysis of monthly Ice Enforcement and Removal Operations shows.

The agency has published data from 2014 to 2024 with less granular data on arrests, detailing only whether each person arrested has any conviction at all. Since the pandemic, Ice has routinely arrested more people without any criminal conviction.

Posting on social media is a new, more public approach to releasing immigration data for Ice.

The agency has plenty of high level figures on the number of arrests, detention, and deportations on the agency’s website, though the data comes with a significant delay. But scrolling through Ice’s social media shows the agency is hyping up the number of people with criminal convictions without any data backing up the administration’s promises to deport people with convictions as the top priority.

Advocates say this is part of a publicity push by the administration.

“Publicly advertising these Ice arrests in an aggrandized way, the use of military flights, the talks with other countries about accepting deportation flights,” Colleen Putzel, associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said, “all of these pieces are laying the groundwork for the mass deportations campaign that the Trump administration wants to carry out.”

In late January, administration officials pressured Ice to significantly ramp up the number of arrests the agency is making, according to reporting from the Washington Post. And the Guardian US reported that the agency is manipulating Google search results to surface years-old reports about raids, in an apparent attempt to create the appearance of arrests happening with greater frequency.

But the lack of detailed data on where the agency is operating creates an air of omnipresence that immigration advocates say is creating an environment of fear.

“Ice has a dual strategy here right now. First is to intimidate and spread fear through headlines, intimidation stunts, and that on its own makes people scared to leave their home to go to work to go to school” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council.

She added: “When Ice engages in intimidation stunts, like flashy social media updates, publicizing quotas and raids, or using military planes to deport people, the fearmongering might look like theater, but it actually hurts all American communities and local economies because people stay home from work and school.”