U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s San Antonio actions may not have grabbed national media attention like high-visibility roundups in Minneapolis. Even so, the agency’s Alamo City field office was responsible for its sixth-highest number of arrests this year, the New York Times reports.
Beyond that, the Times’ investigation of ICE field office data shows the San Antonio area is one of the places that only tallied a moderate number of arrests last year but are now recording “high and steadily increasing numbers.”
To that point, San Antonio’s ICE field office ranked seventh in terms of overall arrests last year, sweeping up a total of 16,380 people. However its total of 5,860 arrests in the fourth quarter, puts it fourth in the nation behind Miami (9,880), Dallas (6,940) and Atlanta (6,400) in respective order.
If San Antonio continues at the same quarterly pace, it will have rounded up 23,440 people this year, a 69% increase from its 2025 total.
Jason Houser, the chief of staff at ICE during the Biden administration, told the Times that the fluctuating numbers suggest ICE’s headline-attracting surges in cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles cut back on the agency’s ability to carry out arrest in other cities last year, including San Antonio.
“What this data shows me is that the surges actually slowed immigration enforcement” in places from which officers were temporarily reassigned, Houser told the paper. “Many of the areas that went about their business and didn’t have their staff pulled away to be sent somewhere else — that’s where we’ve seen increased enforcement.”
The pace of ICE arrests nationwide has exceeded 1,100 per day on average in 2026, nearly double the 600 daily arrests the agency conducted last spring, according to the Times.
In many U.S. locations with so-called sanctuary policies in place, ICE’s the arrest rate this year has remained flat or only gone up slightly, according to the analysis. Roughly half of the people ICE swept up last year were the result of what officials call “custodial” arrests, where the agency takes charge of someone already arrested by a local of state law enforcement agency.
“We need state and local law enforcement cooperation, so we don’t have to have such a presence on the streets,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Times.
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