In recent months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested migrants on the streets, near schools, and at immigration court hearings in an attempt to reach President Donald Trump’s goal of conducting “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.”
In part thanks to those efforts, total ICE arrests have tripled since his inauguration.
But while the administration insists they are capturing the “worst of the worst,” data from the Deportation Data Project based at Berkeley Law School paints a different picture. Comparing the month before the inauguration to the month of July, arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions across the country have gone up about ten times, said David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law and the director of the project, a repository of ICE data collected largely via FOIA request.
The data, which is updated systematically, brings crucial transparency to the administration’s mass deportation efforts, Hausman said.
He spoke with California about how the project began, what the data reveals, and how the deportation efforts under this presidency differ from others.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the Deportation Data Project come to be?
I have this kind of split personality, where on the one hand I was an immigrant’s rights lawyer for a few years, but on the other hand, I am also a social scientist.
What those two roles had in common was these data sets that the federal government keeps for its own operational purposes. And for a long time, I had thought somebody should really put these together in a single place online and systematically update them so that they can be used to track what’s happening in immigration enforcement. And then in early 2025, together with two colleagues, UCLA professor Graeme Blair and immigrant’s rights lawyer Amber Qureshi, we decided to finally do that.
There’s so much data. What are some of the major takeaways?
A couple of things are very clear. First of all, there has been a huge change in the amount of enforcement within the United States. So, way more immigration arrests within the United States, way more people being placed in detention after being arrested within the United States. Now, if you look at just deportations over time, those don’t necessarily look like they’ve changed that much. The reason for that is that the [total deportation rate] masks two countervailing trends. On the one hand, there are many fewer deportations happening at the border now, because many fewer people are crossing the border. And on the other hand, there are many more deportations happening after arrests in the interior, because there’s so much more enforcement there. And by the interior, I mean within the United States, away from the border. Both trends suggest increasing enforcement.
In terms of the interior enforcement, the data clearly show that it’s becoming less targeted, more indiscriminate. So the proportion of people arrested who have been convicted of crime has gone way down under the new administration, just because they’re casting a wider net.
The other aspect of that is that, traditionally, immigration arrests have been transfers of people who were already arrested locally on suspicion of a crime. Over the past couple of decades, the large majority of immigration arrests within the United States happened inside a jail or prison. That too has been changing over the last few months, with those arrests continuing, but a lot more arrests also happening out in the community. And those are the arrests we’ve been seeing footage of: masked agents driving around and arresting people out on the street.
- In California, 43% of people arrested between Jan. 20 and July 31, 2025, had no criminal charges or convictions. During the same period in 2024, the figure was 18%.
Does the data align with how the Trump administration characterizes their immigration and deportation efforts?
The Trump administration partly agrees with this. It agrees that there have been many more arrests in the interior of the United States. But the administration is trapped by this impossible promise that it was going to do mass deportations of people who’d been convicted of crimes. And that’s just impossible, because there are very few non-citizens in the United States who’ve been convicted of crimes. So if the administration wants mass deportations, the only way to do that is to deport lots and lots of people who have never committed any crimes.
How do the numbers from this administration compare to past administrations? Obama was sometimes called the “Deporter-in-Chief.”
President Obama, in his first term, did preside over a massive number of deportations from the interior of the United States. At least part of the reason for that was that a new method of automatically identifying non-citizens who had been arrested by local police came online during Obama’s first term—a program called Secure Communities. That led to a huge jump in the number of interior deportations under President Obama.
I think what’s really different under the new administration is these indiscriminate arrests in the street. And with a real disregard for the law. But that’s not so much a data point. That’s a law point.
Are there other differences with this administration?
There’s so many things that the new administration has done on immigration that it’s hard to know where to start.
Setting aside something like its birthright citizenship order (which almost everyone agrees is illegal, and which I don’t think will ever take effect), one thing that hasn’t gotten as much attention, but is incredibly significant is the administration’s position that anyone who crossed the border without authorization and who’s arrested, no matter how long they’ve been in the United States, is subject to so-called “mandatory detention.” That means they don’t get access to a bond hearing which would allow them to be released while an immigration court decides whether they have the right to stay in the United States.
That’s incredibly significant, because being in immigration detention has a huge effect on whether somebody will win their case. Many people just give up on their case in order to be released from immigration detention, even if they actually were likely to be able to show that they have a right to stay in the United States. So this is really important and harmful, it’s being challenged in court, and it’s linked to the massive increases in funds for immigration detention in the recent bill [the so-called Big Beautiful Bill] that was passed by Congress. It’s supposed to approximately double immigration detention capacity.
Why are projects like the Deportation Data Project important?
To keep track of something like the new administration’s deportation effort, you need data, because it is happening on a mass scale. You need to be able to see, in a bird’s eye view, what’s happening and where.
There are a couple of ways the data has been used. For example, there was a letter from California Republican legislators to the administration that cited the data to push back on the Trump administration’s use of indiscriminate immigration arrests.
It was also cited in court in a case in Los Angeles that produced an order requiring ICE to change its approach to arrests there.
And the data has also been used to show what’s happening, for example, at specific detention centers—how long people are staying there, how many people are in them.
In order to know what’s happening in this kind of mass policy, you need mass information. And that’s what data is.
What’s been the most challenging and rewarding parts of this project?
The hardest part is getting the data. But another huge challenge is making it usable for reporters, policymakers, and lawyers who maybe haven’t interacted with it before.
One of the things that’s been especially rewarding is seeing how local news outlets all over the place are using it to track enforcement in their areas. And then it’s also been really rewarding to see policymakers actually pick it up and cite it and use these facts.
The administration has a track record of ignoring data. What would you say in response to that?
I think, ultimately, data just reflects reality, and in the end, everyone has to come to grips with reality.
