The Independent (UK)

Donald Trump's administration hit record highs of monthly immigration enforcement arrests this summer, with more than 43,000 people arrested in June and another 50,000 arrested in July.

But last month, for the first time since Trump took office, more than half of all people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no prior criminal convictions or pending charges.

A growing majority of immigrants targeted by federal law enforcement officers have no criminal history whatsoever, as officers increasingly target immigrants whose legal status has lapsed or been stripped by the Trump administration, according to new reviews of federal data. The share of arrests of immigrants with past violent criminal convictions fell to less than 4 percent.

The administration has instead shifted its focus to legal immigration pathways, including people seeking asylum, the spouses of U.S citizens stuck in legal limbo, and refugees with temporary legal status whose humanitarian protections were revoked, forcing them to return to volatile countries they fled.

Those immigrants, as well as immigrants already in the custody of local law enforcement, then become easy targets for arrest and removal.

Earlier this year, ICE officials told Congress that the agency plans to deport one million people - and hold at least 99,000 people on any given day in ICE detention centers - in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years.

To meet those goals, the administration has pumped billions of dollars into the Department of Homeland Security, with ambitious plans to scale up detention space and hire more officers. Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been hoping to avoid damning images of militarized officers storming through cities that plagued his predecessor Kristi Noem, but the administration is now confronting scrutiny over the fatal shootings of two immigrants by ICE officers during traffic stops and a surge of arrests targeting immigrants who have been in the country for years without issue.

As ICE shifts away from arresting people with criminal records, the percentage of ICE "arrests" at prisons and jails has steadily fallen, according to data reviewed by the American Immigration Council.

Instead, a growing share of ICE arrests are being carried out "at large," or by officers who track down and arrest people at work, in their homes or in traffic stops. Roughly 63 percent of all ICE arrests were performed "at large" by an officer or through state and local police, according to the American Immigration Council. Those arrests are often supported by state and local authorities through the 287(g) program, which effectively deputizes local police to carry out federal immigration enforcement.

The number of people brought into ICE custody through the 287(g) program is now roughly 14 percent, according to data collected by the Deportation Data Project and reviewed by The New York Times.

Florida police have tallied at least 15,000 such arrests under Trump, according to The Times review. But the program has seen heavier impacts in states without a significant ICE footprint, including Wyoming and West Virginia, where 287(g) arrests in both states have hit more than than 50 percent.

The administration also doesn't appear to be targeting people with final orders of removal, decisions by immigration court judges requiring immigrants to leave the country. In the first week of August, roughly one quarter of arrests targeted people with final orders of removal.

Instead, the administration is increasingly arresting people stuck in bureaucratic hurdles.

ICE is arresting people with lapsed legal status while their paperwork is pending, including immigrants who overstayed their visas while awaiting extensions or green cards. Under previous administrations, those immigrants were rarely detained while in legal limbo, but the president's mass deportation campaign has labeled any misstep - even if the lengthy wait times are the government's fault - as illegal or criminal.

The administration is also working to rapidly remove roughly one million people in the U.S. with humanitarian protections after fleeing disaster and violence in their home countries.

In June, the Supreme Court allowed Homeland Security to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria, two nations rocked by political instability and humanitarian crises. That decision opened the door for the administration to begin stripping protections for tens of thousands of other immigrants from a dozen other nations with the designation.

Following the ruling, administration officials said they intended to begin removing 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,000 Syrians whose protections have now been revoked.

Deportation flights are also increasing.

Domestic transfer flights between ICE detention centers peaked in July, reaching an "alarming" monthly record of 1,363 flights across 61 U.S. cities, according to data collected by Human Rights First's ICE Flight Monitor project.

Those flights amount to the most domestic shuttle flights since at least 2020 when the group first began tracking them.

Deportation flights on U.S. military aircraft also resumed in June, with at least 25 removal flights to Honduras by the end of July.

Last month, ICE performed at least 329 removal flights to 37 countries, an increase of 14 percent from the previous month, Human Rights First found.

Removal flights to so-called "third" countries - where immigrants have no connection - also reached a record high last month. Human Rights first tracked 18 flights to 10 countries, with first-time flights to Belize and Dominica, and repeated flights to Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Panama, Paraguay and Sierra Leone.

Within just 24 hours this month, from August 20-21, Human Rights First tracked third country transfers to Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Paraguay, as well as flights deporting Mexicans to Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica.

"We are extremely concerned about the egregious violations of people's due process rights when they are summarily removed to a third country," as well as the conditions they face upon arrival and the "very real risk people face of being sent onward from those countries to the very places from which they fled," according to Savi Arvey, director of policy, refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First.