A blitz of immigration raids across Southern California — now backed by the National Guard — has met heavy resistance from local communities. And more raids could be coming, with President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan saying that immigration enforcement would be coming to Los Angeles “every day.”

But even as the Trump administration is ramping up raids in places like Southern California, those actions aren’t resulting in many more cases finding their way to immigration courts.

The number of people in the United States arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement did surge in May — nearing 24,000 compared to 12,000 in January, according to federal immigration data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. But the total number of immigration detentions has risen less sharply, from 22,000 to 29,000, as the number made by Customs and Border Protection has dropped off.

Still, ICE was holding more than 51,000 people in detention as of June 1, TRAC data shows — the highest level reported since 2019. Austin Kocher, a researcher at Syracuse University, said in a blog post that the rise was driven by the construction of new facilities that started under President Joe Biden and local police joining a controversial program allowing them to act as immigration officers.

Kocher also found that the share of people detained by ICE who have criminal convictions — a category that includes everything from felonies to a traffic violation, but sets aside immigration violations themselves — has decreased as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has intensified. More than 40% of immigrants detained by ICE have no criminal record at all, according to TRAC.

“The only way for the Trump administration to increase all of its immigration enforcement numbers (arrests, detentions, deportations, etc.) is to target people who have no criminal convictions,” Kocher wrote.

ICE does not publish recent arrest data at the state or city level.

Some people arrested by immigration authorities don’t end up in detention centers, instead being deported immediately or allowed to live at home — while being monitored via their phone or an ankle bracelet — as they wait for their case to move through immigration court.

But with the Trump administration demanding the agency supercharge its deportation efforts, ICE has also expanded its targets to include courthouses, where agents have arrested immigrants going through their court proceedings.

Immigration attorneys and advocates say ICE appears to be tackling the country’s immigration court backlog, which is more than 3.5 million cases long, by having judges deny or dismiss cases — and then moving in to arrest the defendant.

The action isn’t in the courts

In contrast to the number of arrests, the number of new immigration cases has decreased sharply from its record highs in 2023, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. In November 2023, the Department of Homeland Security — including ICE and CBP — issued 260,000 “Notices to Appear,” which order the recipient to appear in immigration court. More than 10,000 were issued to people living in the Bay Area.

That number declined in 2024, as the surge in border crossings under the Biden administration abated and officials severely restricted migrants’ ability to apply for asylum. But perhaps paradoxically, the drop has become even starker under Trump, declining to just 24,000 filings nationally, and less than 1,000 in the Bay Area, as of April 2025. Early in his term, Trump ended the use of a government app that allowed migrants to seek asylum at ports of entry, which may have also contributed to the drop. That could mean that the decline in cases reflects the closing of doors to legal status.

Still, it’s hard to say with much certainty what is driving the trends — or whether they will continue. The most recent immigration court data is for April, while the Trump administration appears to have ramped up its raids in May, meaning the number of people left waiting for their day in court could start climbing again.