Inhumane' How Trump Supercharged Arrest Rates in Immigration Crackdown

In the six months since Donald Trump took office, the US president has supercharged the country's immigration enforcement apparatus, pushing officials to arrest a record number of people in June.

- Maanvi Singh Will Craft Andrew Witherspoon

A Guardian analysis of arrest and deportation data reveals the sweeping scale of these mass arrests and incarceration.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency does not publish daily arrest, detention and deportation data. But a team of lawyers and academics from the Deportation Data Project used a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain a dataset that provides the most detailed picture yet of the US immigration enforcement and detention system under Trump.

Ice arrests have surged under Trump. Within weeks of Trump's inauguration, Ice tripled its number of daily arrests. They spiked further after a heated meeting on 21 May, when Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, ordered Ice officials to aim for 3,000 arrests a day, or 1 million a year.

In early June, Ice arrests peaked at 1,000 a day—far short of Miller's benchmark, but 42% higher than the average daily arrests in May and 268% higher than in June 2014. On 4 June, Ice arrested nearly 2,000—the highest number of people arrested in a single day, according to nearly 10 years of arrest records.