With the administration recently urging ICE to raise arrests to 3,000 per day we check in on the latest deportation trends and their implications for labor markets. While DHS has paused the publication of comprehensive monthly data, they are still reporting timely detention metrics, most easily available via the organization TRAC. These imply that arrest volumes in the interior of the country likely remained under 1,000 per day in May, with deportations perhaps 10k per month higher than in 2024. Consequently, higher deportations are not yet a game changer for employment growth, though they could become more material over time. More important is the slow down in border encounters, which is likely to reduce employment growth around 40k per month vs. last year.

In the US, immigration enforcement is carried out by both CBP and ICE, with CBP stopping people at the border and ICE arresting people in the interior of the country, though CBP will also sometimes transfer immigrants to ICE detention. Immigration enforcement can involve arrests, book-ins to detention facilities, and deportations, though not everyone arrested is detained and not everyone detained is deported, nor are all deportations preceded by an arrest. For our purposes we look at deportations of people already living in the country. While DHS has for now stopped publishing the full data, available detention data show book-ins to detention by arresting agency, with book-ins from ICE arrests very closely mirroring historical data on book-ins from arrests in the interior of the country.

Book-ins from ICE arrests hit 24k in in May (750 per day), 16k higher than the 2024 average. In FY24 ICE arrests in the interior were 25% higher than book-ins though historically that ratio has been lower, so 750 book-ins per day likely implied under 1,000 arrests. Conversely, about 60% of book-ins result in deportation, which is how we translate a 16k rise in book-ins to 10k rise in deportations. A tougher immigration stance could raise that share, though a fall is also possible given a rising fraction of detainees have no criminal convictions or pending charges. In May around 77% of detainees had a conviction or pending criminal charge, down from 94% in December. That is still a high fraction, which raises the question of whether these individuals were even employed to begin with. We lack data on that, but only a quarter of new detainees with convictions had committed serious crimes, so many people probably are employed.

Fewer border encounters should remain the bigger employment drag. From DHS border encounters and custody statis- tics we estimate the number of adults released into the US is recently 80k/month lower than 2H24, and assuming a 50% employment rate within the first year that would cut job growth 40k. One other consideration is that the government has trimmed employment authorization approvals close to 100k/month, despite still rising applications.