If you’re wondering what ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has been doing in Chicago since President Donald Trump launched his deportation campaign in January, don’t look to the department itself.
It stopped sharing comprehensive data on arrests, detentions and deportations once Trump took office.
This includes data for Chicago even as ICE has ramped up at various points over the past few months, and the president in recent days announced stepped-up enforcement his administration dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.
Until January 2025, ICE maintained a detailed and easy-to-use online dashboard showing searchable statistics by location, timeframe and whether someone was arrested or detained for an immigration violation or for criminal reasons, whether that was over a conviction or pending charges.
The dashboard contained about 527,000 arrests, 1.1 million detentions and about 765,000 cases of people officially deported or otherwise removed from the U.S. since October 2020, about a year after Congress first required ICE to regularly publish detention data.
But the agency hasn’t kept its promise to update the data quarterly, even as the Trump Administration raised arrest quotas to 3,000 per day. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, occasionally issues news releases from specific places, for example, citing 822 arrests during a week of increased enforcement in southeast Texas last month.
DHS has not produced public data in response to repeated requests from Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ reporters over the past several months and did not respond to questions about the lack of updates on its dashboard.
But other groups are filling in some key gaps. They offer a big picture view of what’s happened in Illinois through the end of July:
• The Deportation Data Project is a collective of lawyers and academics who say they’re committed to “transparency in immigration enforcement data.” Their effort is to extend ICE’s own data, including about arrests and detentions in ICE custody. They won a lawsuit forcing the government to release these numbers under the Freedom of Information Act. Their data, covering the entire country, currently goes through July.
What the numbers show for Illinois
ICE arrested 537 more people — a 59% rise — in Illinois in 2025 than in 2024 between mid-January and the end of July. And the number of people detained went through the roof. ICE detained 3,182 more people at its Broadview processing center or in downtown Chicago — a 185% increase — this year than in 2024.
Regarding removals or deportations, Deportation Data Project project members said they are “actively seeking updated and corrected data” after finding “significant apparent errors” in the most recent dataset released by ICE.
There’s lots of data to examine on the Deportation Data Project website, going back years, in some cases decades. But the spreadsheets must be downloaded for analysis elsewhere. Unlike the government’s ICE website, there’s no dashboard for easily customizable searches.
• The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse also maintains a database of immigration violations and detentions among its collection of giant government datasets. Many of TRAC’s data tools can be customized on its website.
This collective of researchers at Syracuse University behind TRAC has long relied on the Freedom of Information Act to produce its rich data. But that also means a lag in when data is provided, so any ICE enforcement in Chicago this week won’t immediately show up in TRAC’s datasets or in those made public by the Deportation Data Project.
TRAC sums up its purpose: “to provide the American people — and institutions of oversight such as Congress, news organizations, public interest groups, businesses, scholars, and lawyers — with comprehensive information about staffing, spending, and enforcement activities of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, what are the agencies and prosecutors actually doing?”
What the numbers show for the country
Nationally, the number of ICE detentions is up 69% this year over 2024 as 25,003 more people were detained from mid-January until the end of August. Of those detained in 2024, 37% were arrested by ICE and 63% by Customs and Border Protection. This year, 76% have been arrested by ICE and 24% by Customs and Border Protection.