CHICAGO — From President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January through mid-October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel arrested nearly 210,000 people across the country, including more than 3,300 in Illinois. And that doesn’t include thousands of additional arrests by Border Patrol and other federal agencies.
By this fall, ICE agents were arresting people at a higher rate in Illinois than almost anywhere else in the country.
The people arrested here were as young as 4 and as old as 75.
Most weren’t charged with a crime. But many of those arrested have already been deported.
Those snapshots of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown emerged from a Block Club Chicago analysis of the most recent ICE data available to the public. They offer some context for the federal roundups and attacks witnessed by Chicagoans throughout 2025 — including facts and figures the federal government has been unwilling to provide on its own.
Throughout the year, federal officials have used a flurry of press releases, social media posts and edited video clips to showcase selected parts of their immigration “blitz.” But many of those pronouncements have been misleading or false, and the Trump administration has never disclosed who exactly they’ve arrested, what they were arrested for or what happened to them afterward.
To get answers to simple questions about the immigration roundups, Block Club and other groups have sued the federal government.
That’s how the most recent ICE data was acquired by the Deportation Data Project, a group of legal scholars and advocates who aim to bring transparency to federal immigration enforcement.
The data isn’t perfect. It doesn’t include the names of people arrested or detained. The latest records are also limited to enforcement activity by ICE — and not Border Patrol, which initiated some of the most aggressive and violent federal actions in Chicago.
But the data does include the date, time and state of every ICE arrest from 2023 through mid-October of this year, as well as the country of citizenship and birth year of each person arrested or detained.
Here’s what we learned from it.
How ICE arrest rates in Illinois compared to those in other large states. Credit: Haru Coryne
ICE Arrested People In Illinois At Higher Rate Than Almost Anywhere In Country This Fall
Illinois is the sixth-largest state in the country, with a large immigrant population. ICE has been active here for years.
Trump has repeatedly portrayed Chicago as a hotbed of criminality and a target for his immigrant roundups. After federal officials announced their Operation Midway Blitz here in September, arrests climbed dramatically.
By mid-October, daily arrests in Illinois outpaced every larger state but Texas, when adjusted for population.
Daily ICE arrests in Illinois by criminal / civil charges. Credit: Haru Coryne
Non-Criminal Arrests Drove Midway Blitz Enforcement
Under President Joe Biden in 2024, ICE mostly arrested people who had criminal convictions or who were facing criminal charges, according to the agency’s records. That changed under Trump.
In Illinois, arrests of all groups surged almost as soon as Trump was inaugurated Jan. 20. By summer, ICE was arresting more people on purely civil immigration charges than people convicted of a crime.
By mid-October, more than 60 percent of ICE arrests did not involve a criminal charge or conviction.
In other words, the spike in arrests during Operation Midway Blitz was driven by apprehensions of people with no criminal records identified by ICE.
Who’s been arrested by ICE in 2025: age and sex. Credit: Haru Coryne
Mexican, Venezuelan Citizens Have Borne The Brunt Of ICE enforcement
Who’s been arrested by ICE in 2025: country of citizenship. Credit: Haru Coryne
More than 40 percent of the people arrested in 2025 were citizens of Mexico — perhaps not a surprise given Chicago’s large population of residents with ties to the country.
But citizens of Venezuela made up the second-largest group of arrestees, a reflection of the Trump administration’s decision to target migrants who arrived in the area legally with Temporary Status Protection under Biden’s administration. Trump’s administration changed those rules.
Regardless of their nationality, most of the people arrested were men, many of whom were older than 40.
Though ICE has said it rarely detains unaccompanied children, its records show kids as young as 4 and 6 were arrested in Illinois this year.
Daily bookings at ICE’s busiest facilities. Credit: Haru Coryne
Broadview Became Second-Busiest ICE Facility In Country
As a result of the surge in arrests in the Chicago area, ICE’s “staging” center in suburban Cook County got busier as detained people were taken and held there.
By mid-October, it had surpassed other large facilities in Montgomery, Alabama, and Newark, New Jersey, to have the second-most daily bookings in the United States. Only ICE’s “hold room” in Dallas had more.
Where ICE often sends people after Broadview. Credit: Haru Coryne
Broadview Detainees Were Often Scattered To Out-Of-State Facilities
Facilities in Louisiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana have received scores of people arrested in Illinois, often as they were moved toward deportation. Nearly half of the people ICE arrested here in 2025 have already been deported from the United States, data shows.
The map below shows some of the most common routes that detainees were taken on after being initially booked at Broadview.
NOTES: Graphics are based on Block Club Chicago’s analysis of federal data. Population figures are drawn from the 2020 U.S. Census. Ages are estimated based on birth years. Detention facility coordinates are based on data published by The Marshall Project.
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