On the evening of July 1, Luis Medrano called Houston police for help after his wife had gotten violent and punched him twice in the face during a schizophrenic episode in which she was hearing tormenting voices, according to a police report.
Medrano, 50, a Mexican immigrant who met his wife when they crossed the Rio Grande with a group of about a dozen other migrants more than three decades ago, had tried to take his 47-year-old wife to the hospital, but she refused to go. So he did what he’d done three times before: called the police so they would take her to a hospital.
But this time, the officer arrested her on suspicion of assault and booked her into jail. And after a prosecutor dismissed the case, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, picked her up from jail and eventually deported her to Mexico.
“My children blame me for all of this,” Medrano said. “But believe me, this was not my intention; I only wanted to get her help.”
In Texas, which has the second-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — with more than 1.6 million of the estimated 13.7 million nationally — the local criminal justice system has become the main funnel sending undocumented immigrants into ICE custody, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal government data.
Aura Espinosa, legal department director at FIEL Houston, center, speaks at a press conference on Sept. 26, 2025. She was alongside, from left, Luis Antonio Medrano; his son Kevin Josefa; and Abraham Espinosa, community defense director at FIEL Houston. Medrano’s story is emblematic of how the Trump administration has intensified its immigration enforcement compared to Trump’s first term, which focused largely on the southern border amid a record number of asylum seekers. The administration’s focus has now shifted to Democrat-led states such as California, Illinois and New York, where witnesses have recorded masked ICE agents using force in some cases to arrest people at worksites, immigration courts, commercial parking lots and at their homes.
From Trump’s inauguration to July 29, ICE made 138,068 arrests nationwide, 24% of them in Texas.
The Tribune analyzed ICE’s enforcement data from September 2023 to late July 2025, comparing the last 18 months of the Biden administration with the first six months of the Trump administration’s second term. The data, obtained through a public records request to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by the Deportation Data Project, a group of immigration lawyers and professors, shows that in Texas:
- ICE’s average daily arrests have more than doubled from 85 under Biden to 176 under Trump.
- Daily arrests have jumped about 30 percentage points in the ICE regions that include Houston and Dallas.
- About 52% of ICE arrests have been of people in local jails, down from 61% during the Biden administration.
- Arrests of people who had not been convicted of a crime have increased from 42% under Biden to 59% under Trump.
- The Harris County Jail leads the country in ICE detainers — a request from immigration agents to hold a person for deportation — while jails in Dallas, Bexar and Travis counties have also been in the top 10.
The data is the most detailed information to be made publicly available since Trump’s return to the White House and offers a glimpse into its aggressive immigration enforcement in the nation’s interior.
Legal observers have noted the administration has stopped consistently publishing detailed immigration data that his predecessors routinely shared with the public — in some cases, previously published data has been deleted from government websites. For example, a Department of Justice report that showed immigrants in Texas commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens disappeared from the DOJ website soon after Trump took office.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, responded to questions from the Tribune by citing an Oct. 30 social media post by DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that said “70% of illegal aliens ICE has arrested have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.
“And that doesn’t even account for those wanted for violent crimes in their country of origin or another country, INTERPOL notices, human rights abusers, gang members, terrorists,” the post says. “The list goes on. The media continues to act as a PR firm for criminals.”
Paul Pirela, a Houston-based immigration lawyer, said the data reveal that the Trump administration’s strategy is simple: “Deport as many people as possible and as fast as possible.”
Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigration activist group FIEL in Houston, said his organization can gauge how quickly the Trump administration is working compared to the Biden administration by the number of phone calls they get.
During the Biden administration, he said, “We might get one or two calls with somebody getting picked up by ICE every month, every other month. Now we're averaging about 15 to 20 calls a day.”
That’s because Texas has been among the most receptive states to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, said Rocio Paez Ritter, a sociology and criminology associate professor at the University of Arkansas.
“What is happening in Texas is that there seems to be a system in place that makes it easier to help ICE deport people, compared to other states like California, where there is more resistance,” she said.
Less than half of arrested immigrants had criminal convictions
In its first term, the Trump administration focused on the southern border as hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many from Central and South America, came seeking asylum. The administration implemented policies such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, under which more than 70,000 non-Mexican people were forced to wait in Mexico until their asylum cases wound through U.S. immigration courts.
But the second Trump administration has been even more aggressive in clamping down on undocumented immigrants in the nation’s interior, setting a goal for ICE of at least 3,000 arrests a day. The data show that in the first six months of this term, ICE averaged 727 arrests a day, more than doubling the 304 daily arrests under Biden.
To help meet that goal, Congress approved $170 billion for immigration enforcement in July aimed at expanding immigrant detention centers and hiring as many as 10,000 additional ICE agents by the end of the year — which would more than double its current staffing of 6,500 agents — and enticing recruits with a $50,000 signing bonus.
“So as those new officers come on, that is inevitably going to lead to a major increase in arrests, and as detention centers come online, more people will be detained, and so immigration enforcement is going to get more aggressive over the next two years,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, a group in Washington, D.C., that advocates for immigrants. “I don't see this as just an initial surge followed by a slowdown. I think the goal of this administration is pedal to the metal at all points.”
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump promised “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America,” and administration officials have repeatedly said they are going after “the worst of the worst.”
But during its first six months, the data show that the Trump administration has been arresting more people who don’t have a criminal record than the Biden administration did in its final 18 months. In Texas, 58% of people ICE arrested under Biden had criminal convictions, compared to 42% under Trump, according to the data, which doesn’t specify the type or seriousness of those crimes.
The rhetoric that the Trump administration is going after hardened criminals gives the impression that the administration is focused on the general public safety, said Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine.
“Are like 95% of these people arrested the worst of the worst? I don’t think so,” she said. “So the net keeps widening for who is being caught up in these practices and policies.”
César Cuauhtémoc García-Hernández, an immigration law professor at Ohio State University, said the deportation quotas the administration set for itself are pushing them to look beyond people convicted of crimes.
“There simply are not enough migrants in the United States who have committed serious crimes to reach the kinds of detention and deportation numbers that the president and high-ranking and immigration officials in his administration have committed to,” he said.
Two Texas arrests: One on the street, one at an ICE check-in
The data shows that even though the Trump administration has mostly depended on local jails to find and arrest undocumented immigrants, ICE agents have also conducted more non-custodial arrests on the streets, in homes and during ICE check-ins. Some immigrants who have been allowed into the country are required to report to ICE offices periodically while their immigration cases — such as asylum requests — are pending.
Under the Biden administration, 80% of ICE arrests came from county jails and federal and state prisons. Under Trump, that number has dropped to 64.1% — which underscores the increasing ICE activity outside of the criminal justice system.
One of the people arrested recently was Marwan Marouf, who was on his way to work after dropping off his 15-year-old son at a Dallas high school in September. According to Marouf’s older son, about five vehicles surrounded Marouf’s car when ICE agents pulled him over.
Marouf, a Palestinian born in Kuwait with Jordanian citizenship, came to the U.S. on a student visa to study electrical engineering at Louisiana State University, then landed a job as an electrical engineer in Dallas. That’s where he met his wife, a fellow Jordanian who was visiting her sister. A year later, they married and had their first child, Mohammed Marouf, now 27.
The elder Marouf became active in the local Muslim community, volunteering to mentor young people and deliver sermons at a local mosque. He also volunteered with other religious groups, including local Christian and Jewish leaders, his son said.
As part of his volunteer work, he donated to a Palestinian-led charity called the Holy Land Foundation, which the Bush administration shut down in 2001 and later prosecuted its leaders, accusing them of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, which the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization.
Mohammed Marouf displays a photograph of his father, Marwan Marouf. Marwan Marouf, like many others, said he donated to the charity believing the group's efforts were solely to support Palestinian people affected by the Israel-Palestine war.
So when he applied for his green card in 2014, immigration officials notified him that they planned on denying his application. Five years later, their U.S.-born son sponsored his parents for a green card — his mother’s application was approved in 2020.
But on Sept. 22, when ICE agents arrested Marwan Marouf, they gave him a letter notifying him that his green card application was denied. Since then, he’s been in custody at the Bluebonnet Detention Center, about a three-hour drive from Dallas. His lawyers are attempting to fight his deportation.
“We’re very spiritual, so we know God has a greater plan for us,” Mohammed Marouf said.
Marwan Marouf has never been charged in connection with his donation to the now-defunct charity. But a statement attributed to McLaughlin, from Homeland Security, said: “A green card is a privilege, not a right. If you are pushing Hamas propaganda, supporting terrorist organizations, and conducting other anti-American actions, you will face consequences.”
Marwan Mohammed, third from right, with his family during a wedding in 2022. A month before Marouf’s arrest, ICE agents detained Austin resident Yony Perez-Oduardo, 42, but they didn’t have to go looking for him.
Perez-Oduardo had entered the country in Brownsville in May 2022 and when Border Patrol arrested him, he was placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols and was allowed to remain in the country while his asylum request was pending, as long as he checked in with ICE in San Antonio.
Meanwhile, his 40-year-old wife, Ana and their 14-year-old daughter — who came to Texas through a Biden administration program that allowed Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans to enter the U.S. under a parole program that Trump has since shut down — eventually received green cards, making them legal permanent residents.
Meanwhile, Perez-Oduardo continued to do his semiannual check-ins with ICE, waiting for a decision on his asylum case. On Aug. 12, Perez was arrested at an ICE office in San Antonio as his wife and daughter watched.
“They took him away and our girl had to witness it,” said his wife. “It traumatized her.”
ICE deported Perez-Oduardo to Mexico in the past month, his lawyer said, because it’s a faster process than trying to deport him to Cuba. If he fought his deportation, he could have been kept in detention for months and banned from the country for a decade, said his lawyer, John Tutton. Perez-Oduardo may have a chance to eventually return to the U.S. because his wife has sponsored him for a green card, his lawyer added.
Texas’ immigration crackdown began four years ago
After his wife was arrested in Houston, Medrano told the judge he didn’t want his wife to be prosecuted on the assault charge. When he tried to post bail for her release, Harris County Jail officials told him ICE had placed a detainer on Gonzalez so agents could deport her after her case was settled.
When prosecutors dismissed the case, she was immediately transferred to an immigrant detention center, then deported to Mexico on Oct. 1. Medrano, who was also undocumented, followed her, leaving their four U.S.-citizen adult children behind. They have since relocated to San Luis Potosí, where they have some distant relatives.
In 2017, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office agreed with ICE to let its agents have access to the jail to investigate inmates’ immigration status.
“This agreement has allowed our agency to redeploy deputies who previously were performing ICE duties in the jail to local law enforcement duties that enhance public safety,” said Jason Spencer, a Harris County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson.
Unlike California, which has the most undocumented immigrants in the nation, Texas has followed the Trump administration’s lead in cracking down on undocumented people under Gov. Greg Abbott.
Since 2021, the state Legislature has approved more than $11 billion for border enforcement and building border walls — all part of Abbott’s signature Operation Lone Star, which since 2021 has sent thousands of state troopers and National Guard soldiers to the Texas-Mexico border.
In 2017, the Legislature approved a bill that outlawed any local policies that prevent cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement, a law that has forced immigrant-friendly cities and counties to work with ICE, even if local leaders oppose it.
In 2023, the state passed one of the nation’s most aggressive immigration enforcement laws, allowing state police to arrest and deport undocumented people who crossed the Texas-Mexico border. The Biden administration, El Paso County and immigrant rights organizations sued the state to overturn the law, which is on hold while the case remains pending in the courts.
And in this year’s legislative session, lawmakers approved a law requiring Texas sheriffs to enter into formal agreements with ICE that allow them to deputize some deputies to work as immigration agents. Also this year, Abbott ordered state police to work with federal immigration agents to arrest undocumented immigrants: Between late January and early September, troopers arrested 3,131 people across the state, most of them on suspicion of improper entry into the country.
In Harris County, which leads the country in ICE detainers, Abbott recently launched a violent crimes task force that includes state troopers and local police, and said residents should expect a higher law enforcement presence “swarming” the area.
“The Trump administration is relying quite heavily on partnerships with local law enforcement agencies in Republican-led states, because those are the places that are willing to work hand in hand with ICE,” said García-Hernández, the Ohio State professor.
Those partnerships can help turn a misdemeanor arrest into a deportation.
Once a person is in jail for any offense, ICE agents can check their immigration status, and if they’re undocumented, ask sheriffs — who commonly run the jails — to hold the person for them so they can be transferred to ICE custody and deported.
“Sometimes it's been as simple as a traffic ticket for not wearing a seat belt or a DUI or other charges,” said Pirela, the Houston immigration lawyer.
Medrano said he and his wife, who have lived most of their adult lives in the U.S., will struggle to establish new lives in Mexico.
“Before all this, we had a comfortable life,” said Medrano, who worked as a construction contractor most of the time that they lived in Houston.
Nicholas Gutteridge contributed reporting.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
