President Donald Trump’s administration has significantly increased immigration enforcement in Nevada over the rates seen during the Biden administration, with arrests of people with no criminal record particularly on the rise, according to a Nevada Independent analysis of federal immigration data.

Through the end of June, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested about 48 people in Nevada weekly, more than four times the weekly average in the final 16 months of President Joe Biden’s administration, the analysis found.

Nevada has among the lowest rates of ICE arrests of people without a criminal history, but that is up under Trump — and climbing even throughout the course of his presidency. After top Trump administration officials called in May for more daily immigration arrests, there was a 40 percent increase in arrests of people with no criminal history in Nevada compared with before the accelerated push began.

In total, 15 percent of people in Nevada arrested by ICE had no criminal history, a rate much lower than many other states. Illegally entering the U.S. is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

The data reveals that immigration enforcement is becoming more prevalent in Nevada, which has the highest share of undocumented immigrants in the nation. It also contradicts comments from the administration that its efforts are focused on catching hardened criminals.

“I honestly don't find it that surprising,” Sadmira Ramic, a senior staff at the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, told The Nevada Independent about the data. “We have seen time and time again that this administration makes representations that they want to target the ‘worst of the worst,’ but take different actions.”

The analysis stems from data collected and published by the Deportation Data Project, an initiative by the University of California, Berkeley Law School. Researchers obtained the data through public records requests, and they have been used to detail the scope of the Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdown nationwide, including in Maryland and Los Angeles. 

The data, which stretches from September 2023 to the end of June, has not yet been analyzed in depth in Nevada media reports.

Here are the main takeaways.

Arrests are increasing

Arrests have surged under Trump compared with under the Biden administration.

In the first 26 days of June (the last day included in the data), ICE arrested 265 people in Nevada, which represents a more than 380 percent increase in the arrests compared with the same time period in 2024, when ICE arrested 55 people in Nevada, The Indy found.

They have also surged as Trump’s presidency has progressed.

In the first four weeks of Trump’s second term, ICE averaged about 30 arrests each week in Nevada. At the onset of his presidency, Trump was “angry” about his administration’s arrests and deportation numbers, NBC News reported — there were about 600 arrests daily nationwide for the first few months.

Months later, Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide who is at the forefront of the administration’s immigration agenda, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded 3,000 daily immigration arrests. 

The pace has more than doubled in Nevada since then. In the more than one month since that date, ICE arrested 366 people in Nevada — across the same length of time at the start of Trump’s term, there were 153 ICE arrests in Nevada.

Not only violent criminals

Trump campaigned on targeting “the worst of the worst,” but the ICE data shows that has largely not been the case.

More than 70 percent of the nearly 200 people arrested in Nevada under Trump with criminal convictions included in the ICE data had not committed a violent or sex crime as their most serious offense, The Indy found. About 16 percent of the people arrested were previously convicted of a traffic offense or driving under the influence. 

In Biden’s final 16 months as president, about one-third of the ICE arrests in Nevada were of people with convictions for violent or sex crimes, slightly higher than the rate under Trump.

Ramic is critical of the Trump administration for “not focusing on who it said it would focus on” and said she is especially concerned about the administration targeting people who have taken legal immigration pathways. In May, for example, federal immigration officials detained several asylum seekers before their immigration court hearings — none of whom had any apparent criminal violations. 

Many arrests of people with no criminal record, but a lower share than other states

ICE has significantly ramped up arrests of people in Nevada with no criminal convictions.

The share of ICE arrests of people with no criminal record — meaning they have not been convicted of a crime and do not have charges pending — has more than doubled under Trump to about 15 percent.

Under Biden, three-fourths of ICE arrests in Nevada were of people with prior criminal convictions. Since Trump took office, that number has shrunk to about 45 percent.

However, Nevada has among the lowest rates of ICE arrests of people with no criminal record. In fact, the states with the highest rates are likely to lean more Democratic, with Northeastern and Western states having some of the highest shares of arrests with no criminal record.

Trump has directed ICE to prioritize deportations in Democrat-run cities, an approach that critics have viewed as retaliatory. Despite Las Vegas being run by Democrats (though Gov. Joe Lombardo is a Republican), it stands in a swing state that Trump won last year, with a growing number of Latinos supporting him.

In states that Trump won in 2024, about 20 percent of people arrested by ICE had no criminal record. That rate doubled in states that Trump lost in 2024, The Indy’s analysis found.

“I would not be surprised if we see an increase in these numbers,” Ramic said. 

Other notes

• There were 25 times in Nevada under Trump where a person’s home country was not the same one they were deported to, with almost all of these being people deported to Mexico despite being from other Latin American countries.
  • Under the final 16 months of Biden, there were four times when this occurred in Nevada.
• The youngest person arrested under Trump was born in 2009, meaning they were 15 or 16. Under Biden, there were three ICE arrests of people who were born after 2009.
• Historically, ICE arrests have largely been of people in prison or jail who were arrested for another crime and then transferred to ICE custody if there is a violation of immigration law. However, under Trump, the share of these kinds of arrests has decreased — more than one-third of the arrests under Trump came outside of these facilities, up from about a quarter of the arrests under Biden.

ICE has received widespread backlash for its use of indiscriminate raids to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, but the scope of these arrests is not clear in the data.