15,000 people in Los Angeles region were deported during recent ICE enforcement surge

Nearly 15,000 people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Southern California in 2025 and 2026 to date were eventually deported, according to a new study by the Deportation Data Project based at UCLA and the UC Berkeley School of Law.

At the height of the agency's surge, in June and July 2025, 75% of those arrested were deported, the researchers said.

The study looked at arrests, detentions and deportations of noncitizens within the Los Angeles ICE field office's area of responsibility, which covers the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura. The findings also show that the city of Los Angeles had by far the most apprehensions, with 33% of all "at-large" arrests in the region occurring there.

"The extraordinary impact of the surge is now clear. Nearly 15,000 people have been deported from the region," said Graeme Blair, co-director of the project and a professor of political science at UCLA. "Now we can also quantify what immigrant communities here have felt since the surge began in the summer of 2025: that enforcement never stopped. Over 1,000 noncitizens were arrested just in July 2026."

While ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, had previously relied heavily on taking custody of people already held in jails and prisons, a defining feature of immigration enforcement since 2025 has been a sharp increase in at-large arrests - those carried out in neighborhoods and communities and at ICE check-ins rather than custodial settings.

"DHS leaders made Los Angeles a testing ground in June 2025 for the new at-large arrest strategy, sending immigration agents out into communities, Home Depot parking lots and immigration courthouses, and to make arrests at regular ICE check-ins," Blair said. "Those patterns continued throughout fall 2025. Again, this summer, we saw that the numbers increased as ICE continues to try to hit daily arrest targets."

During the period analyzed, few communities in the region went untouched by ICE, the new research shows. Beyond Los Angeles, flashpoints of at-large arrests included Santa Ana, San Bernardino, Santa Maria and Camarillo. Lompoc and Victorville also ranked near the top, although nearly all their arrestees were transferred from federal prison.

The speed of deportation was also notable. Of those arrested from the beginning of 2025 through May 2026, 62% had been deported within 60 days. Only 7% were released from immigration detention within 60 days.

The status of people arrested during the surge changed as well. At the surge's peak, in June 2025, arrests of people who had no final order of removal from an immigration court were nearly 1,400% higher than 2024 levels, while arrests of noncitizens with no criminal conviction increased by more than 3,400%. Neither group had been targeted by previous administrations.

"Increasingly, noncitizens across the country who had no reason to expect they could be deported have been targeted, and it was folks in the Los Angeles region who bore the brunt of these new enforcement priorities first," Blair said. "These are people immigration judges have not ordered removed, many with legitimate grounds to challenge their removals."

The study, the third in the series of analyses released by the Deportation Data Project, also found that nearly 300 of the 15,000 noncitizens deported were not sent to their country of citizenship. The vast majority of them were removed to Mexico, while others were sent to countries such as Guatemala, Ecuador and Honduras, which have entered into asylum cooperative agreements with the U.S., as well as to countries as far away as Ghana and Eswatini - in some cases on a different continent from the person's country of citizenship.

Arrests across the seven-county region continue at high rates, the project's researchers say. Arrests rose again starting in June 2026, to just more than half of the June 2025 peak.

The Deportation Data Project is a centralized repository of individual-level immigration enforcement data provided by ICE and obtained through litigation filed by the project. The project's analyses are helping draw a clearer picture of the scale of arrests and deportations, as well as who the government is targeting, both locally and nationally.