Within the week after the Supreme Court granted Donald Trump several victories in his anti-immigration campaign, federal authorities reportedly arrested more than 10,000 people, including more than 2,400 immigrants within a single day.
The apparent surge in immigration arrests was ordered by the White House, according to The New York Times, citing three officials with knowledge of the conversations.
“The Trump administration is fulfilling the promise that President Trump was elected on — deporting criminal illegal aliens,” a White House official told The Independent.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have reportedly been instructed to set a new standard of at least 2,000 daily arrests. The number of people in ICE detention has also climbed to more than 63,000, adding thousands of detainees to the nation’s sprawling network of prison-like facilities.
The operations do not appear to be part of any surge, such as operations of militarized officers into Democratic-led cities, after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin entered office earlier this year hoping to keep the agency out of the headlines as he fulfills the president’s mandate to deport 1 million people a year.
But the latest wave of arrests has already come under intense scrutiny from immigration lawyers as well as Democratic and Republican lawmakers. A 56-year-old Catholic nun in Texas left a detention center in tears after she was arrested on the way to Sunday mass, and several arrests inside an immigration courthouse in New York City this week appear to have violated court orders that struck down the Trump administration’s policy of picking up immigrants the moment they leave their hearings.
The surge in arrests reached a high of 2,400 people Saturday, according to documents obtained by The Times.
“I want to personally thank each of you for your extraordinary efforts this past weekend,” ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations executive associate director Marcos Charles wrote to agents. “Through your dedication, professionalism, and unwavering commitment to our mission, enforcement and removal operations achieved remarkable operational results.”
In response to questions about the surge in arrests, a spokesperson for Homeland Security said that the agency “has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists.”
”Our message is clear: if you come to our country illegally, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you,” the person said.
ICE deported 442,637 people within the 2025 fiscal year, which began in the final months of Joe Biden’s administration and ended September 30, before federal agents surged into several cities and made thousands of arrests in street-level sweeps.
Earlier this year, ICE officials told Congress that the agency plans to deport 1 million people — and hold at least 99,000 people on any given day in ICE detention centers — in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years.
Last week, the Supreme Court allowed Homeland Security to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria, two nations rocked by political instability and humanitarian crises. That decision opened the door for the administration to begin stripping protections for tens of thousands of other immigrants from a dozen other nations with the designation.
Following the ruling, administration officials said they intended to begin removing 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,000 Syrians whose protections have now been revoked.
“Either try to fill out the paperwork and be here underneath a permanent status, or we’ll help you get back to your country,” Mullin told CNN last week.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, said “of course” the administration would begin removing those immigrants.
“Well, of course, if you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported,” he said.
The State Department tells Americans “do not travel” to Haiti due to “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest and limited health care.”
Asked whether the administration considered Haiti a safe place, Miller said “Haitians live in Haiti.”
“I mean, it would be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn’t live in Haiti,” he told reporters last week. “It’s their country.”
That same day, ICE agents arrested an Ecuadorian man at an immigration court inside 26 Federal Plaza and a man from the Dominican Republic inside another court at 290 Broadway, both in Manhattan. On Monday, agents arrested a Guatemalan man at 290 Broadway.
The arrests appear to flout court orders blocking the practice of immigration enforcement arrests inside courthouses, according to legal filings first reported by The Intercept.
Last year, the Trump administration ordered immigration judges to dismiss virtually any case when immigrants show up for their court-mandated hearings — making them immediately vulnerable to arrest and removal before they’ve had a chance to appeal.
That policy sparked scenes of masked agents patrolling courthouse hallways and hauling away immigrants who were then placed in fast-tracked removal proceedings in what critics called “ambush”-style arrests that violated due process protections.
In a separate case last year, another federal judge slammed the policy of courthouse arrests as a “game of detention roulette.”
