ICE arrests linked to airports rose under Trump

Data Journalist

WASHINGTON —

During President Donald Trump’s second administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ramped up operations in major cities across the country, targeting places like schools and neighborhoods. The latest enforcement operations garnering public attention have been at airports.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported a rise in arrests at U.S. airports documented by immigration attorneys and documents the publication obtained. The arrests have focused on people with expired visas and have occurred in at least 15 airports, they reported.

The Get the Facts Data Team analyzed data from the Deportation Data Project and found an increase in arrests where the data indicated a connection with airports. That connection was an airport listed as the arrest site landmark or marked as a “current duty site.”

From Trump’s inauguration day, Jan. 20, 2025, to March 10, 2026, there were 568 arrests made by ICE where the agency indicated the arrest was at or near an airport, our Data Team’s analysis found. That’s more than five times the 108 arrests linked to airports in the same time frame leading up to Trump’s second administration.

The Deportation Data Project obtained and then processed the government data via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The latest data was released at the end of March and included arrests through March 10 of this year.

While some arrests by ICE are linked to airports within the data, it isn’t a complete or perfect snapshot. Data from Trump’s inauguration through March 2026 includes just 16 airports, 10 of which had fewer than 10 arrests reported.

Chicago O’Hare International Airport was named 220 times from the time Trump took office to March of this year in the data — a large increase from five arrests it was linked to in the same time period leading up to his inauguration.

Of the 108 arrests identified that were linked to airports in the time period leading up to Trump’s second administration, more than half were at the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Puerto Rico.

Reuters reported earlier this year that an internal document showed more than 800 people had been arrested by ICE following tips from TSA, which shared its data on over 31,000 people traveling.

On Tuesday, American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog organization, released a document acquired via the Freedom of Information Act. The document revealed a data-sharing agreement between TSA and ICE from May 2025.

ICE did not respond to our request for comment about enforcement operations at airports.

The arrests of people with expired visas are a way for the agency to increase its arrests since they already are on the government’s radar for things like having a pending application, according to Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute.

“So it’s an effort to increase arrest numbers as opposed to sort of the larger narrative that ICE is after the ‘worst of the worst,'” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

But for people with a pending application, it wasn’t always an issue in the past when they were traveling domestically, Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

Immigration enforcement has ramped up under Trump’s second administration. A previous analysis from the most recent data released by the Deportation Data Project through March found that the average daily number of ICE arrests has more than tripled since Trump took office in January 2025, compared to the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.

The number of arrests made by ICE has surged under Trump’s second administration, but declined following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers during the administration’s ICE operations in Minneapolis.