Since the federal immigration raids have accelerated through California, triggering violent demonstrations which prompted President Trump to deploy troops in Los Angeles, the state has become the symbolic battlefield of the administration’s expulsion campaign.
But even if arrests skyrocketed, California was not the epicenter of Trump’s anti-immigrant project.
During the first five months of Trump’s second term, California has lagged behind in the Stauque States of Texas and Florida in total arrests. According to an analysis of the Los Angeles Times of federal data on immigration and the application of customs of the Expulsion data projectTexas has brought in 26,341 arrests – nearly a quarter of all the ice arrests on a national scale – followed by 12,982 in Florida and 8,460 in California.
Even in June, when masked federal immigration agents swept Los Angeles, jumping vehicles to tear people from bus stops, car washing and parking lots, California saw 3,391 undertaken immigrants arrested – more than Florida, but still about half than Texas.
When taking the population into account, California falls in the 27th row of the country, with 217 arrests per million residents – approximately a quarter of the 864 arrests of Texas per million and less than half of a whole series of states, notably in Florida, Arkansas, Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgie, Virginie and Nevada.
The data, published after a trial of the Freedom of Information Act against the government, exclude the arrests made after June 26 and fail to identify the details of the state in 5% of the cases. However, it provides the most detailed look to date national ice operations.
Immigration experts say that it is not surprising that California – which houses the greatest number of undocumented immigrants in the country and the birthplace of the Chicano movement – is lagging behind the republican states in the total number of arrests or arrests in percentage of the population.
“The figures are secondary to the performative policy of the moment,” said Austin Kocher, geographer and deputy research professor at the University of Syracuse who specializes in the application of immigration.
Part of the reason why the states dominated by the Republicans have a higher number of arrests – especially when they are measured against the population – is that they have a longer history of working directly with ice and a greater interest in collaboration. In the Red States of Texas in Mississippi, local agents of the application of laws cooperate regularly with federal agents, either by taking tasks on ice through so-called so-called 287 (g) Agreements or by identifying undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and leaving the ice in their prisons and prisons.
Indeed, the data show that only 7% of the ice arrests made this year in California were carried out through the Criminal foreign programAn initiative which requires that local police identify undocumented immigrants in federal, state and local prisons and prisons.
It is significantly lower than 55% of arrests in Texas and 46% in Florida made by prisons or prisons. And other conservative states with smaller populations have relied on the even more heavily program: 75% of Ice Arrests in Alabama and 71% in Indiana took place via prisons and prisons.
“State cooperation is an important stamp in ice arrests and ice operations in general for years,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, Sacramento -based principal analyst at Migration Policy Institute. “We have seen that the States are not only willing to cooperate with the ice, but that the 287 (G) agreements (g) with their local police, will naturally launch a wider net of application within the limits of this state.”
While California considers only a few criminal offenses, such as serious crimes, important enough to share information with ice; Texas and Florida are more likely to report offenses that may not be as serious, such as minor traffic offenses.
However, even if fewer people were arrested in California than other states, this has also experienced one of the most spectacular increases in the country’s arrests.
California ranked 30th in ice arrests per million in February. In June, the state had climbed in 10th place.
Ice arrested around 8,460 immigrants in California between January 20 and June 26, an increase of 212% compared to the five months before the start of Trump. This contrasts with an increase of 159% nationally for the same period.
A large part of ICE’s activity in California has been hyper focused on the Grand Los Angeles: around 60% of the arrests of ice in the state took place in the seven counties of Los Angeles and around Los Angeles during the first five months of Trump. The number of arrests in the Los Angeles region increased from 463 in January to 2,185 in June – a peak of 372%, just after an increase of 432% in New York.
Even if California does not see the greatest number of arrests, according to experts, the spectacular increase in captures stands out for other places due to the lack of official cooperation and public hostility towards immigration agents.
“A lower increase in a place that has very little cooperation is, in a way, more important than seeing an increase in areas that have a lot, a lot of cooperation,” said Kocher.
Ice agents, Kocher said, have to work much harder to stop immigrants in places like Los Angeles or California who define themselves as “sanctuar” courts and limit their cooperation with federal immigration agents.
“They really had to do their best,” he said.
Trump administration officials have long argued that the jurisdictions of the sanctuary give them no choice but to bring people together on the street.
Shortly after Trump won the elections in 2024 and the Los Angeles Municipal Council voted unanimously to prevent city resources from not being used for the application of immigration, the new border application advisor Tom Homan threatened.
“If I have to send twice as many officers because we don’t get any help, that’s what we are going to do,” Homan in Newsmax told.
With a limited cooperation of California prisons, ice agents went to communities, bringing together people whom they suspected of being undocumented by the streets and in factories and farms.
This change in tactics meant that immigrants with criminal convictions no longer constituted most of the arrests of ice in California. While around 66% of immigrants arrested in the first four months of the year had criminal convictions, this percentage fell to 30% in June.
The radical nature of arrests immediately aroused criticism as a racial profiling and generated a robust community conviction.
Certain immigration experts and community activists cite the resistance organized in Los Angeles as another reason why the number of ice arrests was lower in California than in Texas and even less than dozens of states per percentage of population.
“The reason is its resistance, organized resistance: people who literally went to war with them in Paramount, in Compton, in Bell and Huntington Park,” said Ron Gochez, member of Unión Del Barrio Los Angeles, an independent political group that patrols neighborhoods to alert the residents of immigration sweeping.
“They were driven out in the various districts in which we organize each other,” he said. “We were able to mobilize the community to surround the agents when they kidnap people.”
At La, activists patrolled the streets from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, said Goche. They faced ice agents in the Home Depot parking lots and in warehouses and farms.
“We were doing everything we could to try to follow the intensity of the military assault,” said Goche. “The resistance was strong. … We were able, on numerous occasions, successfully defending the communities and chasing them from our community.”
The demonstrations prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard and the Marines in June, in order to protect buildings and federal staff. But the ability of the administration to take arrests struck a roadblock on July 11. It was then that a federal judge made a temporary ban prescription blocking immigration agents in the South and Center of California to target people according to race, language, vocation or location without reasonable suspicion that they are in the United States illegally.
This decision was kept Last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals American. But Thursday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to remove the temporary ban on its patrols, arguing that it “threatens to upset the ability of immigration officials to enforce immigration laws in the California central district by hanging the prospect of contempt of each stop of investigation”.
The order led to a significant drop in arrests in Los Angeles last month. But this week, federal agents have carried out a series of raids at Home Depot from Westlake in Van Nuys.
Trump administration officials said the decision of July and the slowdown in the arrest does not report a permanent change in tactics.
“The sanctuary cities will get exactly what they do not want: more agents in the communities and more application of the work site”, ” Homan said to journalists Two weeks after the court blocked the itinerant patrols. “Why is it? Because they won’t let an agent stop a villain in prison.”
The head of the American border border patrol sector, Gregory Bovino, who directs operations in California, published a quick video on X who epissed the mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass saying to journalists that “this experience which was practiced in the city of Los Angeles failed” with a video showing while smiling. Then, while a mixture of drum and frantic bass launched, the federal agents jump from a van and pursue people.
“When you face opposition to the law and order, what are you doing?” Bovino wrote. “Improvise, adapt and overcome!”
Obviously, the Trump administration is willing to spend significant resources to make California a political battlefield and a test case, said Ruiz Soto. The question is, at what economic and political cost?
“If they really wanted to evolve and increase their deportations,” said Ruiz Soto, “they could go to other places, do it more safely, more quickly and more efficiently.”