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 \u201cblitz.\u201d<\/a> But many of those pronouncements have been misleading or false<\/a>, and the Trump administration has never disclosed who exactly they\u2019ve arrested, what they were arrested for or what happened to them afterward.<\/p>\n To get answers to simple questions about the immigration roundups, Block Club and other groups have sued the federal government<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s how the most recent ICE data was acquired by the Deportation Data Project<\/a>, a group of legal scholars and advocates who aim to bring transparency to federal immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n The data isn\u2019t perfect. It doesn\u2019t include the names of people arrested or detained. The latest records are also limited to enforcement activity by ICE \u2014 and not Border Patrol, which initiated some of the most aggressive and violent federal actions in Chicago.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what we learned from it.<\/p>\n ICE Arrested People In Illinois At Higher Rate Than Almost Anywhere In Country This Fall<\/p>\n Illinois is the sixth-largest state in the country, with a large immigrant population. ICE has been active here for years.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By mid-October, daily arrests in Illinois outpaced every larger state but Texas, when adjusted for population.<\/p>\n Non-Criminal Arrests Drove Midway Blitz Enforcement<\/p>\n Under President Joe Biden in 2024, ICE mostly arrested people who had criminal convictions or who were facing criminal charges, according to the agency\u2019s records. That changed under Trump.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n By mid-October, more than 60 percent of ICE arrests did not involve a criminal charge or conviction.<\/p>\n In other words, the spike in arrests during Operation Midway Blitz was driven by apprehensions of people with no criminal records identified by ICE.<\/p>\n Mexican, Venezuelan Citizens Have Borne The Brunt Of ICE enforcement<\/p>\n More than 40 percent of the people arrested in 2025 were citizens of Mexico \u2014 perhaps not a surprise given Chicago\u2019s large population of residents with ties to the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n But citizens of Venezuela made up the second-largest group of arrestees, a reflection of the Trump administration\u2019s decision to target migrants who arrived in the area legally with Temporary Status Protection under Biden\u2019s administration. Trump\u2019s administration changed those rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regardless of their nationality, most of the people arrested were men, many of whom were older than 40.<\/p>\n Though ICE has said it rarely detains unaccompanied children<\/a>, its records show kids as young as 4 and 6 were arrested in Illinois this year.<\/p>\n Broadview Became Second-Busiest ICE Facility In Country<\/p>\n As a result of the surge in arrests in the Chicago area, ICE\u2019s \u201cstaging\u201d center in suburban Cook County got busier as detained people were taken and held there.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201chold room\u201d in Dallas had more.<\/p>\n Broadview Detainees Were Often Scattered To Out-Of-State Facilities<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The map below shows some of the most common routes that detainees were taken on after being initially booked at Broadview.\u00a0<\/p>\n NOTES: Graphics are based on Block Club Chicago\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast:<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO \u2014 From President Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration in January through mid-October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel arrested nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":466836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818,121074],"class_list":{"0":"post-466835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois","11":"tag-operation-midway-blitz"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115769547330454106","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_viz_states_ALT-1024x799.jpeg\")
How ICE arrest rates in Illinois compared to those in other large states. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_viz_criminal-status-1024x823.jpeg\")
Daily ICE arrests in Illinois by criminal \/ civil charges. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_age-sex-1024x840.jpeg\")
Who\u2019s been arrested by ICE in 2025: age and sex. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_viz_demos-citizenship-1024x846.jpeg\")
Who\u2019s been arrested by ICE in 2025: country of citizenship. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_viz_facilities-1024x774.jpeg\")
Daily bookings at ICE\u2019s busiest facilities. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bcc_ice-charts_transfer-map_5070_positron-1024x1018.jpeg\"){kind=spacer}
Where ICE often sends people after Broadview. Credit: Haru Coryne<\/p>\n