Special Edition: ICE Is Still Everywhere
Special Edition: ICE Is Still Everywhere
At 10:01 a.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, POLITICO published an article that opened like this: “Three months into Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s tenure, he is succeeding in his pledge to get his department out of the headlines.” Two hours earlier, just before 8 a.m. ET, an ICE officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in the stomach through the window of the van he used to get to job sites. Salgado Araujo died later that morning after being taken to a nearby hospital. The article continues:
While the administration has continued to promise “mass deportations” and occasionally still shares slick videos on social media of deportation operations, there are fewer arrests in broad daylight by teams of officers. Instead of arresting immigrants in their homes or on public streets, Mullin and other administration officials have promoted agreements that allow local and state law enforcement agencies to help identify and detain immigrants who are already in custody after being arrested for other crimes.
Violence that doesn’t hit national headlines
The reporters at POLITICO couldn’t have known that as their article went to press, Salgado Araujo was dying or dead. Here is one thing they could have known: On July 1, 2026, six days before Salgado Araujo’s killing, the New York Times reported that ICE had arrested more than 10,000 people in the last five days of June and were now working to meet a 2,000-per-day arrest quota from the White House.
At the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant wrote about ICE’s “withdrawal” after Kristi Noem’s departure:
If the withdrawal marked a shift in public relations, it did not, importantly, mark a shift in enforcement. Indeed, the violence resulting from those operations may be escalating: ICE shootings and killings in 2026 are already outpacing those in 2025. And mass deportation operations have expanded: In five days this June, federal immigration agents reportedly arrested 10,000 people — doubling their usual daily rate of arrests. They are still terrorizing neighborhoods: A recent raid in Virginia Beach involved agents chasing people through backyards, “searching everywhere,” from boats to trash bins, one resident said. They just aren’t marketing it as they once were.
Federal records obtained by the Deportation Data Project show that as of March 2026, “community arrests” — arrests of people not already in detention of some kind — made up 43% of all ICE arrests. We don’t have newer raw data because ICE hasn’t forked it over.
What we do have is local reporting from across the country about recent actions. We know that in June and July, ICE arrested at least 30 people in the Kansas City, Missouri area in the run-up to World Cup games and more than 100 people in and around Bozeman, Montana. We know that in June they arrested a dozen people across small towns in western Washington state, including a dad on his way home from grocery shopping on Father’s Day, and raided a commercial port on the Oregon coast. We have reporting about June and July ICE arrests (groups and individuals) in Bloomington and Evansville, Indiana; Chicago; Danbury, Connecticut; Greene County, Virginia; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Lake Placid, New York; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Salt Lake City, Utah; Seattle; Texarkana, Arkansas; Weston, West Virginia; and more broadly across southern Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oregon.
Meanwhile, Memphis has for months been under what locals called a “full-blown occupation” by the Memphis Safe Task Force, a conglomeration of ICE agents, other federal officers, members of the National Guard, and state and local law enforcement that targets immigrants and citizens alike under the guise of crime reduction. From the task force’s launch on September 29, 2025, through April 1, 2026 (the last date for which data is available), ICE agents arrested nearly 900 immigrants, 80% of whom had no criminal record. People trying to observe and record arrests say that task force officers have threatened, stalked, surveilled, photographed, “bumper rushed,” assaulted, and arrested them. Four community members have sued over sustained retaliation and harassment.
“Smarter and quieter”
Journalists and lawsuits have documented the use of surveillance and violence against community observers in California, Illinois, Maine, and Minnesota. As “enforcement” ramps up this summer, the administration is also criminalizing observers and protestors in increasingly extreme ways. In Minneapolis, the Department of Justice has charged 15 protestors with conspiring to “impede or injure” federal agents, citing innocuous actions including possession of a bullhorn and attendance at DSA meetings as evidence of conspiracy. In Texas, a federal judge sentenced eight people to decades in prison for protest-related actions designated as “antifa” terrorism, including simply moving a box of leftist zines. He publicly acknowledged that the sentences were intended to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”
“While the Department of Homeland Security continues to deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrants,” POLITICO’s reporters wrote, “it is making fewer arrests in public.” They go on:
It’s all with the aim of fulfilling the president’s pledge for large-scale deportations — without attracting the kind of public attention that ignited widespread protests.
“It’s by design,” said one person familiar with strategic discussions within DHS, who like others was granted anonymity to speak freely about the conversations inside its agencies. “Just like Mullin and [acting ICE chief David] Venturella want — quieter and smarter operations. Finally.” .
The raids and traffic stops now underway all over the US aren’t as showy as 2025’s military-style named surges, but higher arrest quotas ensure that they are just as aggressive. ICE arrested more people in June of 2026 than in any month since the beginning of Trump’s second term, and most detainees have no criminal record. The administration presents this widespread aggression as success, and ICE’s operations are not getting any less lethal: On July 13, a week after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing, an ICE agent shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, while looking for a different man. The next day, a 28-year-old man with a valid tourist visa fled an ICE traffic stop in Florida and was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer.
The Times reported that the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations sent an email to ICE staff personally thanking them for late June’s extraordinary five-day surge of 10,000 arrests. “Through your dedication, professionalism, and unwavering commitment to our mission,” he wrote, “enforcement and removal operations achieved remarkable operational results.”