US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on track to make roughly 35,000 administrative arrests in June 2025, which would mark the highest monthly total on record since authoritative data began in FY 2014. The projection comes from an analysis of arrest-by-arrest records published by the Deportation Data Project, a dataset covering more than 95,000 arrests under the Trump administration and Biden-era arrests going back to October 2023.

The record pace arrives as the Trump administration has raised its demand on ICE to 3,000 arrests per day, up from the 1,200–1,500 daily quota announced earlier in 2025. The new target, first reported in late May, is roughly double what ICE has actually achieved even in its strongest stretches.

What does the data show?

Analyst Austin Kocher, who examined the dataset, aggregated every recorded arrest to calendar days and months. His method is simple: take the actual arrests recorded in the first 10 days of June — 11,591 — average them into a daily figure, and multiply by 30 days.

The resulting projection of about 35,000 follows an already exceptional May, when ICE made 22,613 arrests.

Because reliable records only extend back to FY 2014, Kocher is careful with the claim. "This is the 'highest total monthly arrests on record,'" he writes, "with the 'on record' doing the heavy lifting of qualifying that we only have authoritative data going back to FY 2014." Arrests may well have exceeded 22,000 in earlier eras, particularly during the first Obama administration — the data simply does not exist to say.

Are the daily quotas achievable?

The short answer, according to the numbers, is no.

Despite an initial surge in arrests at the end of January 2025, ICE's daily totals:

• did not come close to crossing 1,000 arrests per day until well into May;
• did not cross 1,500 until June;
• met the January quota only for a few days at a time, and only in June.

Kocher is direct about the scale: "To be clear: this is a lot of arrests. I'm not downplaying that." But the totals fall far short of the administration's demands. He concludes that the daily arrest quotas are "detached from the reality of what ICE can do — and even more so now that the new quota is 3,000 per day."

The daily data also reveals a predictable pattern: five days of high arrest activity on weekdays, followed by two days of lower — but not zero — arrests on weekends. This weekday bias, Kocher notes, affects virtually all administrative data.

Why set quotas ICE cannot meet?

Kocher's answer to that question is blunt: "The unattainability of the quotas is the point."

In his analysis, the quotas fit a broader political strategy of manufacturing crises that cannot be solved. No level of funding for immigration enforcement will ever be sufficient to meet the administration's mass deportation goals, he argues, and the goal is not to solve a defined problem but to justify ever-expanding executive power.

He points to a parallel pattern in the rhetoric around the undocumented population. Claims have ratcheted up from 20 million to 30 million to as high as 40 million people, despite poor substantiation — with the numbers growing, he writes, in proportion to each policy win for immigration restrictionists.

Who is affected?

The dataset covers ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations administrative arrests — arrests made in the interior of the United States, as distinct from border apprehensions. The more than 95,000 arrests recorded since the start of the Trump administration include people with and without criminal convictions, though a detailed breakdown by nationality, criminal background, and arrest location is expected in the next instalment of Kocher's analysis.

A separate analysis of the same data by David Bier of the Cato Institute found that ICE is now arresting 1,100 percent more non-criminals from the streets than in 2017, indicating the enforcement surge is sweeping in people without criminal records.

What comes next?

For readers tracking US immigration enforcement, the key numbers to watch are:

• the June total, projected at roughly 35,000 arrests — a record on data going back to FY 2014;
• the gap between the 3,000-per-day quota and actual daily performance, which has peaked above 1,500;
• future releases from the Deportation Data Project, which plans analysis of arrestee nationality, criminal background, and geography.

The underlying records are publicly available through the Deportation Data Project at deportationdata.org, allowing independent verification of these figures.