Arrests, detentions and deportations have been standard practice in every presidential administration. But President Donald Trump is looking to up the ante, allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids in more places and expanding where expedited removals can take place.

He’s also trying to pick up the pace. The Trump administration has set a goal of 75 arrests per day in each field office — more than seven times the standard set over the prior four years at the agency’s Salt Lake City field office, which has jurisdiction in Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Montana. 

Such a quota means that people who are in the country illegally, but who have not been convicted of any crime, are more likely to be arrested than they were before.

With President Donald Trump changing immigration policies and detention facilities for migrants already at capacity, the landscape around immigration enforcement is moving rapidly.

ICE divides the country into areas of responsibility, headquartered at various field offices. Over a four-year period from September 2020 to October 2024 — mostly encompassing the length of the Biden administration — ICE’s Salt Lake City field office, which is responsible for Nevada, removed nearly 7,500 people. More than 5,000 of those removed had criminal convictions.

From arrest to detention to court proceedings to deportation, however, most undocumented immigrants will have some forms of recourse at each step of the process. Here’s a look at their options.

Arrest

The Trump administration has set a goal of 75 arrests per day in each field office — more than seven times the standard set over the prior four years. Such a quota means non-criminals are more likely to be arrested than they were before. Longstanding policy directs ICE to prioritize the detention of violent criminals, but the expanding definition of “criminal” — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump considers anyone who entered the country illegally a criminal, despite it being a civil offense — means that that distinction is not necessarily being honored. On Jan. 27, for example, ICE arrested 1,179 people, but only half were criminal arrests.

Though entering the U.S. illegally or overstaying a visa or other legal means of entry is a civil offense rather than a criminal one, ICE has the authority to initiate an action against someone so long as they can prove that their presence in the U.S. is unlawful.

The most common way that ICE encounters an undocumented person and begins initiating proceedings for their detention and removal is through jails. In Las Vegas, the Metropolitan Police Department has a policy of notifying ICE when it books and again when it releases any foreign-born person accused of violent felonies, domestic violence, driving under the influence or various theft charges. 

With that information, ICE can pick up a potentially deportable person from the jail, but Metro does not place an immigration hold — keeping an undocumented immigrant in jail for additional 48 hours after a release date — on any detainee solely on the grounds that they’re undocumented. On Wednesday, Sheriff Kevin McMahill said that Metro has never seen ICE pick up more than 40 percent of the detainees that the department has notified ICE that they have in jail. Between Jan. 31 and Feb. 5, ICE picked up four individuals from the Clark County Detention Center.

One notable policy in the Trump era is that ICE is performing collateral arrests, rather than just booking those that they sought in any enforcement action or raid. 

”They look for [certain] individuals,” said Juan de Pedro, the lead immigration attorney at the De Castroverde Law Group in Las Vegas. “And if anybody else happens to be around, those are collateral detainees — collateral people that they can take as long as they know or find out that that person's here undocumented or illegally.”

From there, ICE needs to file a notice to appear in immigration court — the immigration equivalent of an indictment — explaining to an immigration judge why they believe the individual is deportable.

To prepare for the possibility of ICE initiating proceedings, de Pedro advises all undocumented immigrants to have their important documents — passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses and others — in a secure location. And if immigrants have any pending efforts to legalize their status — whether it be a petition from a family member or a provisional unlawful presence waiver application — de Pedro recommends copying receipts of those forms and carrying them. 

Each ICE agent has discretion about whether or not to make an arrest or file charges — and while it’s not a bulletproof method of defense, having a pending application in the immigration system can occasionally keep undocumented immigrants out of ICE’s crosshairs.

“I've had clients tell me that in the past that an officer saw that they had something pending, and then said, ‘I see you're doing something. I'm not going to [initiate] an action against you,’” de Pedro said. 

Detention

Immigrants arrested by ICE are detained at the agency’s network of county jails and for-profit prisons. Currently in Nevada, there are four facilities where those arrested by ICE are detained — the Henderson Detention Center, the Nye County Jail, the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump and the Washoe County Jail. Combined, they housed more than 350 detainees in 2024.

Those with criminal arrests or convictions for various crimes — violent felonies, but also now larceny and theft after the January passage of the Laken Riley Act — are typically subject to mandatory detention. They have no possibility of being let out on bond.

But plenty of people who ICE initiates proceedings against are not subject to mandatory detention. They can be released at the discretion of ICE — typically because of a lack of bed or resource capacity at detention centers — or if an immigration judge sets bond.

Bond — a payment to the court as a term of release that is partially refunded at the end of proceedings if the defendant returns for subsequent court dates — is higher on average for undocumented immigrants in immigration court than U.S. citizens in criminal courts. A detainee must first make a motion to the immigration court for a bond hearing, at which point a judge can consider whether to grant it. 

The minimum bond in immigration court is $1,500, but it often goes much higher. Michael Kagan, who directs the UNLV Immigration Clinic that defends people in deportation proceedings, said the average bond in Las Vegas Immigration Court is $5,000.

De Pedro said initial detentions typically last “at least a couple weeks” as detainees seek out counsel, are scheduled to see a judge and request bond. 

When in detention, court deadlines are typically tight to get bond rulings quickly. But undocumented immigrants can end up in detention for years on end if they are not granted bond as their cases work their way through immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals and even the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“This happens in our cases at the immigration clinic all the time, that will be bouncing around up and down [through] different levels,” Kagan said. “So that becomes why people can stay in ICE detention for years.”

While ICE does not publish capacity statistics for individual detention centers, it does publicize the total number of detainees each center saw per year and what the average length of stay was. The Washoe County Jail, which saw the least number of detainees among Nevada locations in 2024, had an average detention period of less than two weeks, while the Nevada Southern Detention Center, which saw by far the most detainees, keeps immigrants there for more than six weeks, on average.

Courts

Unlike U.S. citizens facing charges, undocumented immigrants are not guaranteed the right to a taxpayer-funded attorney. Therefore, detainees have to pay out of pocket for any legal assistance. But if the person seeks to retain an attorney, the immigration court will typically postpone proceedings to allow time to find one.

This is the part of the process that can last years, owing to a long-standing backlog in immigration courts.

First, an immigrant will plead to the charges that ICE has laid out as to why he or she is removable — with the first allegation being that the person in detention is not a U.S. citizen. (With ICE having arrested numerous U.S. citizens in recent weeks, including Native Americans and Puerto Ricans, Kagan said that provision has become an important safeguard.)

Next, a judge will make a finding about the removability charge. If the charge is sustained, the immigrant can apply for relief from removal — giving a legally recognizable reason why they should not be deported.

Asylum — the legal right to remain in the U.S. because of the credible fear of persecution in one’s home country — is one such relief. Cancellation of removal, which requires proving that one’s deportation would cause extreme hardship to U.S. citizens or lawful resident family members, is another.

Relief seekers must submit applications detailing their eligibility, and then an immigration judge schedules an individual hearing.

“The individual hearing is like a trial,” Kagan said, noting that the undocumented immigrant, called the “respondent,” is like a defendant, while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is analogous to the prosecution. “Witness statements can be taken, and the immigration judge will need to make findings of fact and legal conclusions about whether you should be granted or denied the relief you're seeking.”

Once the judge has made a decision, either party — the undocumented immigrant or DHS — can appeal the case to the Board of Immigration Appeals. If the immigrant loses at both junctures, the judge would submit a final order of removal. 

But the immigrant could appeal again up to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco via a petition. Kagan said that occasionally one of the higher courts will not make a determination about the case but rather rule that there was an error in the process, sending the case back down to be relitigated.

De Pedro said for people who arrived in the past two years, he typically sees a three- to four-year processing time for court cases. Getting an initial hearing, an attorney in place and an initial finding of removability takes one to two years in Las Vegas, de Pedro said. But once an immigrant files an application for relief from removal, it takes an additional two years to get a hearing scheduled.

“Right now, I'm getting individual hearings for the end of 2027,” he said.

Deportation

If a removal order is issued and the appeals process ends, the next step is deportation. But the logistics of deportation and the politics of it are two separate equations.

There are more than 1 million people estimated to be in the U.S. who have existing removal orders that have not yet been carried out, either because of executive discretion or because their whereabouts are unknown, often because the deportation order was issued in absentia decades ago. Some countries limit the number of deportation flights they accept; others, such as Honduras and Brazil, refuse to accept any deportees at all. 

And deportation is a complex logistical operation requiring numerous flights to various countries — meaning it cannot always happen swiftly.

“How many people [ICE] can deport — whether because of having enough planes or because other countries will or won't take them — that then reverberates through the system because they also have a limited number of detention beds,” Kagan said. “And if they can't deport people, then the detention beds might not be empty, which means that then when they're arresting more people, they don't have a place to put them. You can see how it snowballs.”

Undocumented immigrants with removal orders can also seek a withholding or deferral of removal if they can prove to a judge that they would be at risk of human rights violations or torture if returned to their country of nationality. If a judge grants such a deferral, it can be difficult for the government to actually enforce the deportation, because it has to find a safe third country. 

The Trump administration and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele are actively pursuing an agreement so that Venezuelans and others from countries that refuse to accept deportees could instead be deported to El Salvador. Currently, the U.S. only has such an agreement with Canada.

One way that the Trump administration is seeking to fast-track the deportation process is by expanding the use of a procedural tool called “expedited removal.” Created in 1996, it was initially used to deport migrants at the border who had entered the United States in the last 14 days without needing to go through an immigration judge, so long as the individual was not seeking asylum or did not have a fear of persecution in their country of nationality.

Expedited removal was expanded in 2004 for use within 100 miles of an international border.

Trump expanded the definition in January to include undocumented immigrants anywhere in the interior of the U.S. who cannot prove they have been in the country longer than two years — making Nevadans now subject to such speedy deportation.

“Especially for someone from Mexico, they could be deported from Las Vegas within a week or two,” Kagan said.

Both immigration attorneys advised that undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for more than two years keep records — such as a driver’s license that was renewed before 2023 — on them, while acknowledging that presence can be difficult to prove, depending on the renewal date of common identification documents, and that the lack of safeguards is troubling.

But the ability to prove U.S. presence for more than two years can be the difference between a full process in immigration court and a quick deportation.