United States: ICE Arrests Surge
We hereby share an article published by The Worker on the 10th of July.
Federal immigration agents in the United States detained over 10,000 people between June 25th and July 1st.
Federal immigration leadership made directives to lower-level Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to have their agents focus more of their energy on actively detaining people, including putting “80 percent of their officers on arrest operations.” In July, the Trump Administration set a new daily detention quota at 2,000—about twice the amount of daily detentions that were being carried out earlier this year, according to reports from monopoly outlet The New York Times.
While ICE has not yet been able to consistently reach last year’s 3,000 daily kidnapping quota from Stephen Miller, the Trump Administration’s deputy chief of staff, in the past few months ICE has recruited thousands of agents with its recent budget increase by billions of dollars.
ICE has changed its tactics in light of its defeat by the people in Minneapolis at the beginning of this year. Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota was a provocative ICE terror campaign and show of force that was shut down by hundreds of thousands of people protesting throughout the month, with some engaging in street battles against local and federal police forces particularly in the aftermath of the murders of anti-ICE activists Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.
ICE similarly targeted other big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles by announcing their deployment and then sending thousands of agents to kidnap foreign-born workers. After the defeat of the large ICE operations, the number of daily ICE detentions dropped significantly starting in February 2026. Now, ICE has reorganized its resources and turned to quieter tactics with less visible kidnappings to meet higher daily detention quotas.
This most recent surge in detentions takes place less than a month after David Venturella, a former GEO Group executive, took over as the acting director of ICE. GEO Group, a prison monopoly, has benefited financially from increased ICE detentions over the past year, making profits of more than $250 million in 2025, almost seven times more than they made in 2024.
“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO George Zoley said in May, “and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well.”
Activists and workers have continued to rebel against ICE’s campaign of deportations and their terror tactics. In Houston, TX, protesters marched against the ICE murder of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in July, while in State College, PA, revolutionary organizations marched against local police cooperation with ICE.
Image: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, 2017. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
