Colorado’s first immigration arrest of the second Trump administration came shortly after the president was inaugurated on Jan. 20. Before the inaugural ball kicked off in the nation’s capital, a Honduran man in his late 20s was arrested in Craig.
Between when President Donald Trump returned to office in January and June 10, 1,355 people in Colorado have faced administrative arrest by federal immigration authorities, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was obtained by a team at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s a nearly 300% increase from the same period in 2024, when 342 people were arrested in the state, according to The Denver Post’s analysis of the data.
The arrests in Colorado this year amount to more than 9 per day, on average, since Jan. 20.
Those arrested in Colorado include people from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Guatemala. Some were from China, Chile and Brazil. One Afghan man who was arrested on Jan. 21 had his expedited removal proceedings canceled, according to the data, because he faced a credible fear of torture or prosecution.
“We have seen a dramatic increase in ICE’s presence, in ICE arrests,” said Raquel Lane-Arellano, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.
ICE’s Denver field office did not respond to a message seeking comment before the Fourth of July holiday. The agency’s national office also did not respond when asked about the number of immigrants arrested in Colorado.
The new data offers the clearest look yet at the pattern and pace of immigration enforcement activities in the United States amid Trump’s mass-deportation efforts. The numbers were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Deportation Data Project at Berkeley’s law school.
Colorado is one of 38 states where arrests have at least doubled this year, according to a recent New York Times analysis of the Berkeley data.
The data show that immigration agents immediately went to work in January to pursue Trump’s goal of deporting millions of immigrants without proper legal status. Since the beginning of the president’s second term, ICE has more than doubled its daily immigration arrest rate, averaging 666 immigration arrests per day, compared with fewer than 300 per day in 2024.
The Berkeley data is imperfect, making it difficult to gauge exact figures, experts and advocates said. The Post identified a handful of duplicate arrest records and removed them from its analysis. ICE’s published data has previously had inaccuracies or missing fields, experts and advocates warned, prompting researchers at Syracuse’s longstanding TRAC project, which also publishes data about ICE operations, to question the administration’s rhetoric compared to reality.
TRAC’s director, Susan B. Long, cautioned in an email that information in the dataset may be missing or omitted as ICE consolidates numbers across different databases.
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According to TRAC’s national data, 56,397 people were detained by ICE as of June 15, when ICE last publicly disclosed its figures. The ICE detention center in Aurora has held steady throughout the year so far at a daily population of roughly 1,150 people, according to TRAC.
Data reflects ICE activity on ground
For this story, The Post included only arrests that ICE listed as occurring in Colorado, rather than in the broader Denver office’s “area of responsibility,” which also includes Wyoming. Many arrests included in the dataset for the Denver sector did not include the state in which the arrest occurred, further obscuring the scale of ICE’s operations, and Long said ICE has consistently said it doesn’t keep state-level data at all.
Still, immigrant-rights advocates said the numbers broadly reflected the situation on the ground.
“This is consistent with what we’ve been seeing and hearing,” said Jorge Loweree, the policy director at the American Immigration Council.
The Trump administration, he said, “has prioritized immigration enforcement over any other federal law enforcement priority and … is pulling resources from anywhere and everywhere to try to achieve any sort of semblance of the mass deportations that they’ve promised.”
A majority of those arrested in Colorado had not been convicted of a crime, according to the data. About 40% were listed as having a prior criminal conviction and 30% had charges pending. The remaining 30% were listed only as “other immigration violator.”
That proportion has grown: During Trump’s first 70 days in office, about 44% of arrestees had been convicted of a crime. Over the next 70 days, that number dropped to 36%.
No information was provided about the convictions, charges or immigration violations.
Colorado Republicans largely have supported Trump’s focus on immigration enforcement, including by backing significant ICE funding increases. But some — including U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, who represents a suburban battleground district north of Denver — have been critical of ICE’s priorities. Evans and others have argued that the focus should be on immigrants with criminal records, not those who are otherwise law-abiding.
Rising pace of arrests
The Trump administration’s effort isn’t slowing down: Congressional Republicans’ massive tax bill, passed Thursday, includes tens of billions of dollars for ICE to hire 10,000 more agents and increase detentions. A new detention facility has already opened in the Florida Everglades.
The administration’s goal has been to deport roughly 1 million people per year. Despite the surge in arrests, ICE and its partner agencies are off track to hit that target in Trump’s first year, as The Post reported last month.
But more resources are coming. And in late May, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, demanded an increase in arrests.
In the two and a half weeks that followed, arrests in Colorado and elsewhere in the country rose, jumping to roughly 12 a day in the state, according to the Berkeley data.
Colorado has not seen the type of workplace raids that galvanized protests — and a subsequent military response — in Los Angeles last month.
But the Trump administration has sued the state and its capital city for their laws prohibiting certain information-sharing with ICE. Agents have made arrests near courthouses in Denver and inside of federal buildings where immigration cases are heard. Among a handful of large-scale operations, ICE agents raided apartment buildings in Denver and Aurora in February, sparking a large protest at the state Capitol.
“The impact has been profound on families. The community has been put into a really precarious position,” said Lane-Arellano, from the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition.
But she praised Colorado’s response to the crackdown: “Fortunately, in Colorado and in Denver, there’s a strong community of people who care about their neighbors.”
The New York Times contributed to this story.
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