Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests have shot up 77% in Northern California since the last year-plus of Joe Biden’s administration, according to recently released data from ICE.
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The sharp rise in immigration enforcement comes amid the Trump administration’s push to deport millions of immigrants lacking permanent legal status. The effort has even strained the ability of sanctuary communities, such as Santa Clara County, to resist ICE arrests in their area.
From January through May of this year, there have been an average of 334 monthly arrests in the San Francisco Area of Responsibility. That area includes arrests in all of Northern California from the Central Valley to the Oregon border, as well as enforcement in Hawaii, Guam and Saipan, according to ICE.
In the last 15 months of the Biden administration, monthly arrests in the same area averaged 189.
The San Francisco spike is slightly less dramatic than the spike in enforcement nationwide, where monthly arrests averaged 9,300 from September 2023 through December 2024, and have grown 90% to 17,800 monthly arrests since January 2025.
The data was acquired by the Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers aiming to make immigration data public through Freedom of Information Act requests. Arrest data goes from September 2023 through June 10, 2025.
Officials from ICE did not respond to a request for comment from the Bay Area News Group.
The spike in arrests is not unprecedented, said Caitlin Patler, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley – in 2017, she noted, there was a “very dramatic” spike in arrests at the beginning of Trump’s first term. But it is unusual and has sparked fear among immigrant communities as waiting lists for legal assistance grow and calls of potential ICE sightings to rapid response hotlines surge, according to local immigrant assistance nonprofits.
The biggest changes to immigration enforcement nationally since January, Patler said, include revoking policies that blocked immigration enforcement from entering certain protected sites such as schools and churches, as well as increased collaboration with local law enforcement and partnerships with other federal agencies.
“That (collaboration) is probably what I would assume is driving this spike in San Francisco,” Patler said. “What would it look like if we didn’t have a sanctuary policy in place?”
California has laws that block state and local law enforcement agencies from collaborating with ICE in many cases – a status that Trump has said is obstructing the federal government from conducting immigration enforcement, even as federal agents find ways to make arrests locally. Earlier this week, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles claiming its sanctuary city policies break federal law and discriminate against immigration authorities.
“The Trump administration made clear that it would target California and other places that have sanctuary policies,” Patler said. “It has made good on that promise.”
The change in tactics is evident in the new data from the agency, which shows that since January the number of arrests are up, while the share of people arrested with criminal convictions has decreased.
The agency has three categories for those they arrest: “convicted criminal,” “pending criminal charges” and “other immigration violator.” Immigration violations include overstaying a visa, reentering the United States after being deported or being wanted for a crime abroad.
People with criminal convictions made up 66% of those arrested from January through May 2025 in the San Francisco Area, down from 84% of those arrested from September 2023 through December 2024. And in the first days of June, just 44% of those arrested in the region had criminal convictions.
A large portion of arrests by immigration enforcement comes from other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, through the Criminal Alien Program, which focuses on the arrest of people who are incarcerated. Average monthly arrests under that program have tipped up slightly, from 135 a month in the last 15 months of the Biden administration to 140 in January through May of this year, but the change in the category does not account for the notable increase in overall arrests.
The largest increases in apprehension methods has been in categories ICE has described as “at-large” arrests, which they define as arrests “conducted in the community, as opposed to in a custodial setting such as a prison or jail.” Those types of arrests have increased from an average of 38 per month at the end of the Biden administration, quadrupling to 161 per month in 2025 in the San Francisco Area of Responsibility.
“This is just a very clear indication that they’re using this tactic of arresting people at home, on the street, in the courtroom, at churches,” Patler said.
Since January, the nationalities with the highest representation in arrests in the San Francisco Area included Mexico with 897, Guatemala with 121, Honduras with 120 and El Salvador with 113. Some other countries had much smaller numbers – usually fewer than 10 individuals – such as Argentina, Canada and France.
Nationwide, the highest number of arrests were individuals from Mexico (35,909), Guatemala (13,370), Honduras (11,156), Venezuela (6,890) and El Salvador (4,701).
Most people arrested in the San Francisco Area under Trump have been between the ages of 20 and 50. Arrests peaked among those in their 30s and 40s, with the highest number (69 arrests) at age 35. Many people in their late 20s to early 40s also had high arrest numbers with above 50 arrests per age group.
Arrests were lower but still present among young people. There were three arrests each of 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds. A total of 37 children under the age of 18 were arrested. There were also a handful of arrests of seniors, with the oldest being 84 years old.
Across the country, arrests were most notable among people in their 20s and 30s, and the highest numbers of arrests were between the ages of 25 and 35, with each age group having more than 3,000 arrests. The peak was age 31, with about 3,650 arrests.
The increase in enforcement has fueled fear in local immigrant communities, said Mariam Arif, communications and development director for the Services, Immigrant Rights & Education Network, a nonprofit organization.
“There is a lot of fear,” Arif said. “It’s just causing panic and chaos and uncertainty across the Bay.”