United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 1,993 Indian nationals in 2025, more than double the 820 arrested the previous year, marking a significant escalation in enforcement after President Donald Trump took office in January.
Of the 1,993 arrests, 1,669 individuals had no criminal convictions, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a Freedom of Information Act request processed by the Deportation Data Project, and analysed by Scroll. This figure includes 535 people with pending criminal charges and 1,134 with no criminal charges at all.
ICE classified the 1,134 people without convictions or pending charges as “other immigrant violators,” a category that typically includes visa overstays and unauthorised entry.
California recorded 643 arrests of Indian nationals in 2025, the highest of any state followed by Texas (237) and New York (115). The three states together accounted for half of all arrests.
On his first day in office in January 2025, Trump rescinded the Biden administration’s policy of prioritising public safety threats and recent border crossers for arrest. The new policy called for ICE to attempt to arrest all undocumented immigrants, regardless of criminal history.
The Deportation Data Project obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act request –similar to India’s Right to Information Act – filed by the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. After ICE did not respond for six months, the Center filed a lawsuit in December 2024 to compel the release. The first data was produced in March 2025, with updates through mid-October.
The Deportation Data Project collects and publishes US immigration enforcement data through public records requests. The Center for Immigration Law and Policy is a legal organisation that litigates immigration cases and advocates for policy changes.
In addition to the arrests, 3,258 Indian citizens were detained in 2025 through November, compared to 1,400 in 2024, the Union External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told the Rajya Sabha last month.
The monthly deportation rate for Indians more than quadrupled from 60 per month in 2024 to 250 per month in 2025, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.
Among those targeted for deportation were international students. As reported earlier by Scroll, the Trump administration revoked over 8,000 student visas in its first year in office. Starting March 2025, ICE terminated the immigration records of thousands of foreign students studying in the United States.
Among them was Akshar Patel, a computer science student from India at the University of Wisconsin, whose immigration record was terminated based on a speeding ticket from years earlier that had been dismissed.
During an April 2025 court hearing in Washington DC, US District Judge Ana Reyes criticised the Trump administration’s process as “arbitrary and capricious”.
“If we deported every single individual in this country who’s been tagged for speeding, there’d be very few people left,” Reyes said. The administration later reversed the terminations after facing several lawsuits and court orders.
The arrests and deportations contradict the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that his administration is targeting “the worst of the worst” criminals. At a press conference on January 20, 2026, marking the one-year anniversary of his second term, Trump said, “We’re looking to get the criminals out right now, the criminals. We’re focused on the murderers, the drug dealers.”
This is despite the data showing that the number of people deported without any criminal record increased more than six times – from 280 per month in 2024 to 2,100 per month in 2025. Deportations of people with violent convictions increased marginally from 790 to 1,100 per month. In a November 2025 interview with CBS News, Trump acknowledged his policy applies to anyone who “came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out”, regardless of criminal record.
The data obtained by the Deportation Data Project covers arrests through mid-October 2025 and the final count of Indian nationals arrested in the first year of Trump’s presidential term is expected to be even higher.
ICE has faced growing criticism over its enforcement tactics this month after its agents fatally shot two people in Minneapolis within weeks. On January 8, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who was driving home after dropping her son at school. Weeks later, agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse at a veterans’ hospital who was filming an ICE operation.
The killings sparked mass protests across the US, which are set to continue.
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