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The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surpassed 10,000 arrests in just five days, nearly doubling the rate of arrests recorded at the beginning of the year, as revealed this Wednesday by The New York Times, cited by the EFE agency, based on internal documents and interviews with federal officials.
The number of daily arrests increased from approximately 1,000 at the beginning of 2026 to nearly 2,000 per day, a goal that the White House communicated directly to ICE agents, as confirmed by three officials to the New York newspaper.
One of those officials warned, however, that "it is not clear how long that level of activity can be sustained."
Unlike the major operations that the Trump administration launched with wide media coverage in cities like Chicago or Los Angeles, the recent escalation has been carried out with a more discreet profile, without large-scale public displays.
The arrests have been made during immigration controls, traffic inspections, and operations in public spaces, according to the newspaper.
The change in strategy is said, according to the NYT, to respond to the criticism generated by the high-impact operations carried out in previous months, which led to a tactical adjustment by the administration.
The offensive comes at a time when the Supreme Court has expanded the executive's scope of action on immigration matters, although it also halted Trump's attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors.
The surge in arrests is part of the mass deportation policy that President Donald Trump has promoted since his return to power in January 2025, one of the main promises of his second term.
Since then, ICE's detention capacity has grown from fewer than 40,000 people to over 70,000, and arrests of individuals with no criminal records have increased by 2,450%.
The Cuban community has been particularly affected by this escalation. The detentions of Cubans rose by 463% between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2026, and over 42,000 Cubans in U.S. territory are considered deportable by the Department of Homeland Security.
The ICE office in Miami led the operations with an average of 120 arrests per day and over 41,000 detentions accumulated from January 2025 to April 2026.
The controversial detention center known as "Alligator Alcatraz," located in Florida, was closed in June 2026 after processing nearly 21,000 deportations, including those of numerous Cubans who had lived in the country for decades.
In parallel, a federal judge in California nullified national ICE policies that allowed arrests within immigration courts, marking a legal setback for the administration.
The Trump administration aims to expel one million people in the fiscal year 2025-2026, and has approved over $200 billion for ICE and the Customs and Border Protection Office for fiscal year 2027.
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