New figures reveal that the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants in the US increased to a three-year high in 2017, following years of decline. On Thursday, the Pew Research Center revealed that as many as 143,470 people were held in detention in 2017 by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a rise of 30 percent compared to the year before.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is responsible for the enforcement of federal immigration laws in the US and has the legal right to detain undocumented immigrants and deport them from the country. The Center, which analyzed the agency’s statistics on administrative arrests, the term used to describe the arrest of those with no legal right to be in the US, said that the increase in arrests began after President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.
The biggest increase in arrests took place in Florida, Oklahoma, and northern Texas, according to Pew. Over 16,500 arrests took place in just the Dallas area of the latter state, with an increase in arrests of over 50 percent in 2017 from 2016 in the areas surrounding the cities of Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and New Orleans.
But, in 2009, the year that President Barack Obama took office, ICE arrests across the US were twice as high as in 2017, with almost 298,000 arrests carried out. Customs and Border Protection arrests declined by as much as 25 percent in 2017, compared to the year before.