This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at coloradosun.com.

Immigration arrests have quadrupled in Colorado and almost tripled in Wyoming since President Donald Trump took office in January with a significant shift in who is being targeted, new data from the federal government shows.

Most people arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents between Jan. 20 and June 26 of this year in Colorado and Wyoming did not have any criminal convictions, according to ICE data released over the last few weeks. Among those arrested who had a conviction at the time of their arrest, the most serious crime is most often noted by ICE as drunken driving in both Colorado and Wyoming, the data shows.

The data, obtained from ICE and published by the Deportation Data Project, is the most detailed, publicly available picture of who is being swept up by ICE’s dragnet arrest tactics in the two Western states this year. The University of California, Berkeley School of Law, which is behind the project, published the data, and The Colorado Sun and WyoFile analyzed arrests made under the jurisdiction of ICE’s Denver field office, which covers both states.

The ICE arrest data contradicts the purported goals of the Trump administration to target the “worst of the worst.” Increasingly, ICE is arresting immigrants with no criminal history, the data shows. Advocates who work with immigrant communities said the tactics, which include arresting people who appear for their immigration court proceedings, are unlike anything they’ve seen before.

Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, said in her 15 years of working with immigrants, she has never seen ICE arrest people with pending asylum cases and no criminal history. Now, she said, that is common in Colorado.

“People are being picked up from their homes, workplaces, people are being picked up as they’re walking their dogs,” she said. “This is ruthless and I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

The arrest dataset is imperfect, and The Colorado Sun and WyoFile analysis required reporters to make inferences. For example, some arrests were noted as having occurred in the Denver field office area, but the data entry did not include whether the arrest took place in Colorado or Wyoming.

In these cases, reporters used an arrestee’s unique ID number to search for the state in which they were arrested in another data file, the detentions or detainers datasets. When the arrest entry referred to an obvious state landmark, such as the city of Casper in Wyoming, the reporters assigned the arrest to that state. When such an inference could not be made, the reporters removed the arrest from the dataset and did not include it in the analysis. In total, the analysis included 556 arrests from 2024 and 2,162 arrests in 2025 and discarded fewer than 100 arrests.

Some of those arrested had a criminal conviction listed in one of the datasets, but not in another. The Colorado Sun and WyoFile only counted criminal convictions in the arrest data, which UC Berkeley and other news organizations have determined is the most reliable dataset.

Given the need to infer certain information, this analysis may differ from analyses made by other newsrooms. For example, The New York Times reported that immigration arrests in Wyoming had doubled, not tripled. But The Colorado Sun and WyoFile’s analysis found more arrests attributable to the state than The Times did.

ICE officials declined to respond to questions about the data and The Colorado Sun and WyoFile’s analysis, even though the data was produced by their agency.

Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun

Reporters sent questions to Steve Kotecki, ICE’s spokesperson for the two-state region. Kotecki told reporters he forwarded that request to ICE’s national media office. Reporters then received a response from a generic ICE email account declining to verify the agency’s own data. ICE refused to provide a statement from a named official, and instead sent a brief, unsigned statement that echoed national talking points.

ICE’s response to WyoFile and The Colorado Sun’s request for information about local arrests reflects a growing effort by the agency to make its officials faceless and nameless in the public eye. ICE agents have worn masks during operations around the country and declined to share their names with the people they’re detaining and members of the public. Some attorneys prosecuting detained immigrants have reportedly sought anonymity.

ICE’s increased focus on immigrants with no criminal history comes as the administration attempts to reach its goal of 3,000 immigration arrests per day. The tactics have spurred protests across the country in recent months, including in cities in Colorado and Wyoming.

Colorado and Wyoming are very different politically and demographically. Colorado is run by a Democratic governor and legislature, while Wyoming is overseen by a Republican governor and legislature. Nearly 10% of Colorado residents are foreign-born while just 3.6% of Wyoming residents were born in other countries, according to the latest U.S. census figures.

The data shows the immigration crackdown in Colorado has been more aggressive than in Wyoming.

Immigration activists and attorneys told WyoFile and The Colorado Sun that in Wyoming the increase in arrests appears built on a system that relies on local law enforcement to alert ICE when officers detain immigrants suspected of committing local crimes. The high-profile, heavy-handed ICE raids and mass arrests seen in other states in the West have been rare. 

A growing number of Wyoming sheriffs have signed agreements to facilitate cooperation with ICE. Such agreements would likely violate Colorado laws prohibiting significant cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE. Activists say that even in Wyoming counties where there isn’t a more formal arrangement, deputies are now more likely to call ICE when they jail someone they suspect is unlawfully in the country. At the same time, ICE is more actively responding to sheriffs’ reports and is more likely to come pick up people from jails than they were under President Joe Biden’s administration.

“They’re here,” Bianca Infante, program director of the Cheyenne-based statewide immigration advocacy group Juntos, said, referring to the growing number of arrests. “The way they’re acting is more strategic, it’s less visible. But just because we’re not seeing it as much doesn’t mean that they’re not here.”

In Colorado and Wyoming, most people arrested by ICE during the first five months of the Trump administration had no criminal conviction, the data shows. That’s a reversal from the same time period in 2024, when most people arrested by ICE had been convicted of crimes, the data shows.

Of those who had criminal convictions when they were arrested this year, most were for nonviolent crimes, according to the FBI’s definition.

Among those arrested in Colorado and Wyoming are people whose convictions are decades old, although the dates are not always included. Three people arrested this year have convictions ICE says date from 1992 to 1999, and 10 people have convictions from 2000 to 2005.

Very few people in the data appear to have been deported to countries where they don’t have citizenship. But the list includes nine Venezuelan men arrested in Colorado since Jan. 20 who were sent to El Salvador on March 15. At least three other Venezuelan men arrested under the Biden administration were also sent to El Salvador that day, according to the arrest data.

The data does not include names. But the departure date indicates these men may be part of the group of nearly 300 people the Trump administration deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador. They were deported without an opportunity to challenge the federal government’s allegations that they are gang members, according to lawsuits filed over the CECOT imprisonments.

None of the men from Colorado, who range in age from about 22 to 35, had criminal convictions when they were arrested by ICE, according to the data. One had an aggravated assault conviction associated with his ICE detention file. El Salvador released the men to Venezuela in a prisoner swap Friday, according to The Associated Press. It is not clear if all of those arrested in Colorado are included in the swap.

Republicans in Congress voted earlier this month to increase ICE’s annual budget from $8 billion to about $28 billion, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the country.

The cash infusion will continue to increase arrests, detentions and deportations, said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. And, she said, more of those arrested, detained and deported are likely to be people whose only offense is entering the country illegally.

“If they want to keep up the pace of arrests they’ve been conducting,” she said. “They’ll have to widen their gaze beyond people with criminal convictions.”