Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas and across the country have increasingly targeted people who are not already in law enforcement custody, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal data.
In Houston, where the killing of an immigrant by an ICE agent has garnered national attention, the monthly number of ICE arrests outside of detention facilities has more than quadrupled, even as in-custody arrests are still more common. The number of arrests in public spaces and homes jumped from a monthly average of 150 under former President Joe Biden to more than 640 under the first 13 months of the Trump administration. Those made up nearly a third of all ICE arrests in the city as of early March 2026, rising from 16% under Biden.
Statewide, the share of community arrests jumped from 14% to 36% of all arrests. Meanwhile, the increase nationwide was smaller, growing from 34% to 43%.
This shift in strategy from jail pickups to arrests in broad daylight can raise risks of violent altercations in public places, an immigration professor and immigration lawyer warn.
That’s what happened this week when ICE agents fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, they said.
“The shooting of the gentleman in Houston is exactly the tragic outcome to the kind of on-the-street encounter between ICE and residents of local communities that has become increasingly common — but also increasingly violent,” said César Cuauhtémoc García-Hernández, an immigration law professor at Ohio State University.
Salgadao Araujo, a father of three, was driving his van to work Tuesday morning when ICE agents in unmarked black vehicles stopped them. A Mexican citizen who had lived in Houston for 35 years, he had no criminal record. He was also not the target immigration agents were looking for when they stopped his van, and his son said he was also in the process of obtaining legal residency.
An updated review of federal immigration data through early March 2026 by the Tribune also found arrests of people with criminal convictions in Houston fell from 61% under Biden to 39% under Trump.
Additionally, overall arrests in Houston and Texas have increased in the last year. In February 2026, ICE made around 7,100 arrests, of which 1,660 were in Houston. That’s a substantial increase in arrests from February 2025, when ICE made nearly 4,200 arrests, of which nearly a third were in Houston.
The Tribune analyzed federal government data obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a group of immigration lawyers and professors. The data is aggregated directly from government immigration agencies through Freedom of Information Act requests, the group says.
The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement on Friday, disputes the project’s data.
“This data is being cherry-picked by the Deportation Data Project to peddle a false narrative,” the department said. “DHS nor ICE have verified the accuracy, methodology or the analysis of the project and its results. The bottom line is that the Deportation Data Project is not accurate.”
The local criminal justice system has long served as an easy spot for immigration agents to find and send undocumented immigrants into ICE custody. But immigration and legal experts say federal officers have shifted their strategy to keep up with the administration’s demand for thousands of ICE arrests a day.
In particular, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes compared to U.S. citizens so García-Hernández said ICE may be running into a “mathematical limitation.”
“To meet the aggressive and historically unprecedented deportation promises that the Trump administration has made, ICE has to start targeting people who are not on the radar of the local police or incarcerated,” he said.
And as the administration shifts to more “non-custodial” ICE arrests — which are arrests of people who aren’t already in state or federal custody — Paúl Pirela, a Houston-based immigration lawyer, said this tactic can lead to more dangerous altercations.
“By doing the non-custodial arrest and doing these public raids in crowded areas, mistakes will happen and then you’re putting people in danger,” Pirela said.
Pirela also said they risk more racial profiling.
“And the dangerous part is that it could lead to more violence,” he added.
Salgado was fatally shot in Houston’s east end, a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Pirela also said ICE presence and ICE raids have been concentrated in Harris County’s other Latino neighborhoods, such as north Houston and Humble, a town about 20 miles northeast of downtown Houston.
Overall, García-Hernández also attributed the sharp rise in non-custody arrests in Texas to the state’s major immigrant population, which he said provides federal agents more targets for arrests.
Texas, home to the second-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — with more than 1.6 million of the estimated 13.7 million nationally — has become a focus of Trump’s promise to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in the country’s history.
And Harris County is estimated to have more than 600,000 undocumented residents, placing it second to Los Angeles County, according to a 2025 report from Migration Policy Institute.
“The fact there are large migrant population centers in Texas’s urban centers and that these are people who are waking up every morning and leaving home to go to work means that it is much easier to spot these individuals,” García-Hernández said.
In addition, he said, Republican leaders in Texas have long welcomed ICE agents to the state by reducing barriers of immigration enforcement operations.
Most recently, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withdraw funding from Houston and two other major cities earlier this year over policies that he said limited police cooperation with ICE. Civil rights groups said Houston then gutted its ordinance — which directed local officers not to prolong traffic stops and other encounters to give federal agents time to respond to suspected undocumented individuals — to keep $114 million in public safety grants.
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