The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency arrested 10,000 people in a five-day period in late June. This is a major step up in the work of the agency tasked with implementing the Trump administration's mass deportation program, the Associated Press reported, BTA reported.
The arrests came after the agency shifted its approach from high-profile arrests in major U.S. cities to quieter ways to achieve the president's deportation goals, the AP noted.
The numbers show that while ICE is no longer taking strong action in individual cities, the detentions continue and are increasing.
The total number of arrests during the five-day period that began last Friday and ended Tuesday averaged about 2,000 people per day. It has not yet been specified where the people, first reported by the New York Times, are being held.
The arrests also come amid a surge in the number of people being held in ICE detention centers, which reached about 39,000 in June, up from 30,000 in February, the AP added, citing data from the University of California, Berkeley's Deportation Research Project.
The month with the highest number of ICE arrests was December, when an average of 1,283 people were arrested per day.
In January, when the streets of Minneapolis and surrounding areas were flooded with hundreds of immigration officers, arrests averaged 1,212 per day. The following month, arrests dropped to an average of 1,057 per day, according to data from the Deportation Research Project.
After the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noam, her successor, Marquan Mullin, proposed taking a more low-key approach to immigration enforcement and seeking to keep the department out of the headlines.