Immigration arrests in Louisiana since President Donald Trump took office are on pace to exceed the state’s count from full-year 2024, according to an analysis of federal data.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 1,989 people in Louisiana from when Trump returned to office Jan. 20 through June 26, according to an analysis of data from the Deportation Data Project. More than half of those arrestees have since been deported or removed from the U.S.
The project, led by attorneys and professors in California, Maryland and New York, collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Its research showed ICE arrests in Louisiana totaled 2,421 last year, a nearly fourfold increase from 690 arrests in 2023. Immigration enforcement dramatically increased in the final year of the Biden administration in response to a surge in border arrivals and asylum seekers.
The analysis shows convicted criminals have accounted for 954 or 48% of ICE arrests this year in Louisiana under the Trump administration. Another 672 people had pending criminal charges, and 362 were accused of immigration violations.
The Deportation Data Project also tracked the immigration court case statuses of the individuals arrested. It found 888 people were removed from the U.S. because they weren’t eligible to be admitted, and another 388 were deported.
There were 682 immigrants with active cases, and another 35 who either had their charges dropped, proceedings terminated or relief granted. ICE also confirmed 79 people self-deported after their arrest.
Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, recently took part in a tour of three of the nine ICE facilities in the state. She said arrestees held there have no real indication of when their cases will be finalized – or whether they will face deportation.
“Trump has eliminated parole, like you cannot get out while you wait for your case,” Odoms said. “No matter what kind of case you have, everyone is just being locked up indefinitely.”
Louisiana’s eight ICE detention centers and its processing hub in Alexandria have an official combined capacity of approximately 6,000. Only Texas, with 26 ICE detention centers, holds more people.
The vast majority of people ICE has arrested in Louisiana since Jan. 20 are from Central America and Mexico. Honduras led the way with 717, followed by Mexico (689), Nicaragua (167), Guatemala (164) and El Salvador (76).
Persons arrested by ICE in Louisiana this year have ranged in approximate age from 4 to 74 years old. The vast majority, 1,199 were 36 to 50, and 18- to 35-year-olds were the next largest group at 651. Specific ages were not available in the data because ICE only provided the birth year of arrestees.
Men account for more than 95% of ICE arrests in Louisiana, a rate also seen last year.
The data also lists apprehension sites, though most are designated by the detention facility where the arrestee is taken and not necessarily where the arrest occurred. Since Jan. 20, 278 apprehensions were reported at the Federal Correctional Institution at Oakdale, a low-security prison in Allen Parish. Jefferson Parish had the next highest number of arrests at 266, followed by the Lafayette area (158), the federal prison in Pollock (131) and the New Orleans area (123).