New internal data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows a major surge in the number of migrant arrests in the San Diego region in the past 12 months.
In January 2025, ICE agents arrested 169 people in its San Diego Area of Responsibility, a territory that combines San Diego and Imperial counties, and that number held relatively steady through mid-2025. But monthly arrests rose to more than 1,000 in September 2025.
In July 2026, the number hit 1,964.
In total, between Jan. 21, 2025 and Aug. 6, 2026, the most recent date for which figures are available, nearly 18,000 people were arrested by ICE agents in the San Diego area. Across California, ICE arrested 51,000 people. This means 35% of the total of California arrests took place in San Diego and Imperial counties, which only represent 9% of the population of the state.
People arrested in the San Diego area during this period hailed from dozens of countries, from China to Chile, Uzbekistan to Ukraine, though more than 75% were citizens of Mexico. At least 769 were children.
The upswing in arrests in the San Diego area mirrors an increase nationwide, as data shows ICE arrests climbing despite more than a year of public criticism over enforcement tactics. Public backlash rose in fall 2025 as immigration agents clashed with local residents in Chicago, then escalated further in the winter as enforcement in Minneapolis led to confrontations that left two activists dead.
Even as Homeland Security officials temporarily claimed those surges had ended, actual enforcement numbers continued to rise nationwide.
The data was collected and newly published by the Deportation Data Project, a non-profit watchdog organization run by professors at UC Berkeley, that publishes periodic data dumps on ICE arrests. The datasets offer a window into the agency’s tactics, priorities and record keeping.
According to the data, the monthly number of arrests in the San Diego area first crossed a thousand in September 2025, when ICE began arresting immigrants at routine check-in appointments at their downtown San Diego office. The next spike came in July 2026, as ICE ramped up its efforts nationwide, arresting nearly 50,000 people across the country. By comparison, the average number of monthly ICE arrests during the Biden administration hovered just above 10,000, less than the number of people arrested in a single week last month.
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No criminal record
The data lists 73% of the people arrested in the San Diego area since January 2025 as having no criminal record. Over half had never been charged with any crime other than entering the country without permission or overstaying a visa.
This data comes four months after Rep. Mike Levin (D-Oceanside) demanded further information from ICE about the criminality of the people arrested in immigration enforcement raids in San Diego. In April, ICE leadership sent a letter to Levin including data that 16,368 people had been deported from the San Diego area since President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time, but did not include details on the criminal records of the deportees.
“The public should use these numbers to hold the government accountable and to push for greater transparency about who is being targeted for removal. Without that context, raw deportation figures can easily be used to paint a misleading picture of what these operations actually look like on the ground,” Levin said in April.
But the number of arrests did not necessarily translate to deportations. Only 8,083 people, less than half of the total arrests in the San Diego area since Jan. 21, 2025, have a “departure date” listed in the data, indicating that they were deported or chose voluntarily to leave the country. The other 9,786 people either remain in detention centers, awaiting clarity on their cases, or were released. Only 701 people whose arrests were labeled as taking place in the San Diego area between Jan. 21, 2025 and Aug. 6, 2026 are listed as remaining in a detention center. That means over 9,000 people were released, often with ankle monitors, and with appointments scheduled to check-in at an ICE office for further supervision.
Immigration detention
Of the 10,201 people who were arrested in the San Diego area since Trump’s inauguration and whose arrest data could be linked to a subsequent detention, 6,511 were first held in the basement of the Edward Schwartz Federal Building in San Diego, underneath ICE’s regional office. While many migrants may only have passed through the building for a few hours, others were held there overnight or longer. Some who had stayed there for up to four days told Times of San Diego last fall that they ate undercooked food, slept on mats on the floor and were forced to pay over 50 dollars for a phone call.
Over the course of their stints in detention centers, which ranged from a few hours to 477 days, immigrants from the San Diego area were transferred between detention centers. Though the most common incarceration sites were the Otay Mesa, Imperial Regional and California City detention centers, immigrants were transferred as many as 13 times and sent as far away as Louisiana and even Guantánamo Bay.
Over the past year and a half, political figures and immigrant advocates have criticized the sweeping arrests of undocumented people in the San Diego area, some of whom had lived in the United States for decades, raising families, paying taxes, and laboring alongside American citizens.
“Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation agenda has ripped families apart and created fear and chaos in our communities,” Rep. Juan Vargas (D- Chula Vista) said in April, referring to the White House adviser who has driven much of the administration’s immigration enforcement approach.
Despite the backlash, Trump administration officials say the wave will continue. “We’re turning up the heat on the streets,” Border Czar Tom Homan told reporters in June. “We’re out there working harder than we ever have because we’ve empowered our law enforcement to do their job.”
