LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Due to federal records requests filed by the Deportation Data Project, we can now see ICE arrests in the Los Angeles area have plummeted this year after surging in 2025.
In President Donald Trump’s first year in office, ICE made 14,302 arrests in the L.A. area.
That includes L.A. County as well as Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
That’s a sharp rise from President Joe Biden’s last year in office, considering that in 2024, ICE made 4,684 arrests in the L.A. area.
So far this year, ICE has already arrested more than 2,612 people just in and around Los Angeles.
So who are those who’ve been arrested?
The data tells us that 39% of them had no criminal history before their arrest, meaning they did not have any criminal convictions or pending criminal charges at the time of their arrest.
The average age of those arrested is 41 and 87% of them are men.
The ICE data also shows more than half of those arrested in the L.A. area, or 52%, were born in Mexico.
After 7 On Your Side Investigates broke down the arrest data month-by-month, we can see ICE arrests in Southern California peaked in June of last year with nearly 2,500 arrests.
The numbers dipped and stayed relatively steady, until there was a significant drop in arrests last month.
After ICE arrested over 1,500 people in the L.A. area in January 2026, arrests fell to 809 in February.
This drop comes right after President Trump faced pressure to scale back ICE activity after the deaths of protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
“They (ICE) have pulled back in general,” Immigration Attorney Meredith Bown said to 7 On Your Side. “They’re trying to use more intelligence, more data gathering to look for people who have removal orders.”
Nationwide, ICE has made 384,490 arrests since the Trump Presidency.
This data does not include arrests made by Customs and Border Protection, but only ICE.
We did reach out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for comment on these new numbers and the trends we found, and a DHS spokesperson sent us a statement that says, in part:
“Since Day One, DHS law enforcement 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. We will continue to deliver on the President’s promise to make America safe again.”
“The Deportation Data Project relies on information releases that have not been reviewed, audited or given context. DHS nor ICE have verified the accuracy, methodology or the analysis of the project and its results. The bottom line is that the Deportation Data Project is not accurate.”
The Deportation Project says it is sharing government data provided by ICE in response to FOIA requests.
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