Lately, hardly a day can pass without another disturbing headline detailing alleged abuses of power by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good; five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’ detainment; face-covering bans, including one newly approved by Denver City Council; and seemingly endless apartment raids.
Americans have no shortage of anecdotal evidence that ICE enforcement is increasing around the country, but a new analysis from economists at the University of Colorado Boulder provides hard numbers to back that up—and quantify just how massive the increase has been.
The study—authored by CU Boulder economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox, with University of California Berkeley colleague Caitlin Patler—examined 10 years of data from the Department of Homeland Security. The data, which includes details on ICE arrests from October 2015 to October 2025, has been collected over time through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. (If you want to poke around the raw numbers yourself, you can access them on the Deportation Data Project’s website.)…