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Immigration arrests surged in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey during the first 14 months of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Immigration arrests in Pennsylvania more than quadrupled during the first 14 months of President Donald Trump’s second term, rising from 2,004 during the final 14 months of the Biden administration to 8,796 between Jan. 20, 2025, and March 11, 2026, according to an Associated Press analysis of the Deportation Data Project from University of California, Berkeley.
Immigration arrests have more than tripled in Delaware in the same time period.
In New Jersey, there has been a 159% increase in immigration arrests in the past 14 months.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania rank in the top 10 states with the most immigration arrests from when Trump took office in January 2025 to March 11, 2026.
New Jersey ranks eighth in the country, while Pennsylvania ranks 10th.
(Associated Press)
Pennsylvania is home to Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigration detention center in the Northeast with a capacity of 1,876 detainees. Delaney Hall Correctional Facility, another major immigration detention facility, is the largest in New Jersey. There is no immigrant detention center in Delaware.
Increase in ‘at-large’ immigration arrests fuels surge
Immigration arrests taking place since Trump assumed office in January 2025 fall into two categories: people who are in the custody of the criminal justice system, and people who are not, said Jennifer Lee, an associate professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law.
Historically, all administrations have moved people in the custody of the criminal justice system who are also facing civil immigration violations into the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removal deportation system, Lee said.
The second category of arrests that Lee said “feels more new to people” are arrests that are unrelated to someone being in the custody of the criminal justice system. That includes arrests conducted during workplace raids and traffic stops, as people are coming to or leaving the courthouse and at routine immigration check-in appointments.
In January, the number of immigrants in detention reached a record high of about 73,000. Those “unprecedented” numbers are in part due to the Trump administration’s new policies about who can be detained, Lee said.
More than 70% of immigration detainees have no criminal conviction, per data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group that compiles immigration detention data via records requests.
Lee said previous administrations had more discretion over whether people facing removal proceedings were held in detention. Under current policy, she said, broader categories of immigrants are subject to mandatory detention.
“For example, if you enter the country without a visa, the policy now is that you have to be detained, so it’s spiked the number of people in detention,” she said.
When people are in detention, the deportation process is “much quicker,” Lee said, and that has, in turn, hastened deportations.
Lee said the spike in arrests in Pennsylvania during the last year and a half could be attributable to the exponential growth of collaboration agreements between local law enforcement and ICE under the federal agency’s 287(g) program.