By Tim Webber, Des Moines Register
- ICE arrests and deportations in Iowa this year have already exceeded last year’s totals.
- Those arrested and deported have primarily been men, young adults and citizens of Mexico or central American countries.
- The length of time between an arrest and a deportation in individual cases also appears to be decreasing.
President Donald Trump vowed to ramp up deportations if voters returned him to the White House.
And data shows that in Iowa, he’s making good on his promise.
That’s resulted in several major national headlines over recent months, including the deportation and return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from Maryland and the detention of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk.
Now, there’s data to show just how much the Trump administration has ra
mped up arrests and deportations, both nationally and in Iowa.
Arrests and deportations in Iowa have both nearly tripled in the first five months of 2025, compared with the same time period last year, the data shows.
In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already arrested and deported more people in Iowa in the first five months of this year than it did throughout all of 2024.
The Deportation Data Project released the data it obtained for the past two years, showing individual case information for ICE arrests and deportations. The database entries don’t identify individuals but contain some demographic data, as well as the locations and arrest dates.
Here’s what else the data reveals about ICE activity in Iowa.
ICE has primarily arrested men, young adults in Iowa
The ICE data shows a wide gender gap among those the agency has arrested in Iowa.
The arrests this year include 439 men and 12 women. A majority of the men (266)Â have since been deported, compared with three of the women.
That gender gap is not new: In 2024, about 94% of the people ICE arrested in Iowa were men.
The ages of arrestees skew younger as well.
ICE’s data shows birth-year information for each arrested individual, indicating that birth years between 1989 and 2004 are relatively common — nearly every birth year in that range appears at least 15 times. That corresponds to roughly ages 20 to 35.
Lily Smith/The Register
Arrests of older people do happen — ICE has arrested at least three people older than 60 so far this year — but not at the rate of younger people.
ICE data also indicates about three in five people arrested this year have a criminal conviction on their records.
About 30% have at least one charge but no conviction, and roughly 9% had no charges or convictions, according to the Deportation Data Project’s interpretation of data definitions.
NOTE: “Most serious conviction” is only recorded among a portion of deportees.
Information on criminal convictions for 211 people ICE arrested in Iowa this year and later deported show that none are listed as aggravated felons. The most frequent charge was driving while under the influence of alcohol.
To which countries are Iowa arrestees being deported?
ICE arrestees this year typically have been citizens of nearby countries, most prominently Mexico.
More than 100 Mexican citizens have been arrested in Iowa and later deported. Mexico’s southern neighbor, Guatemala, is next-highest, with 69.
The ICE data lists citizenship for most deportees, with countries in central America and the Caribbean relatively well-represented.
A handful of people who have been arrested and deported from Iowa this year have been from more distant countries, such as Burkina Faso, Moldova or Thailand.
In most cases, ICE data indicates those deportees have been returned to their countries of citizenship. With the information available, it’s difficult to discern why people were deported elsewhere in the handful of remaining cases.
People whom ICE deported after an arrest in Iowa have largely been sent to countries where they have citizenship.
The country on the left is the country of citizenship for individual deportees, and the country on the right shows to where they were deported.
Deportation timelines appear to have quickened
With a number of cases still active in the ICE database, determining the average length of time between an arrest and a deportation is tricky. But the data appears to indicate that deportations are occurring sooner after arrests than in previous years.
In 2024, 67 people were arrested in Iowa and subsequently deported within the first six months of the year. The median number of days between arrest and deportation was 29, or just over four weeks.
In 2025, the number of deportees who met that same criteria increased to 260, while the median number of days between arrest and deportation dropped by more than a week, to 21.
Filtering the data in this way allows for the most even comparison between years, but it has the downside of leaving out cases that are still open or took an extended length of time.
Even so, the increased number of deportations processed within the first half of the year and the decreased time between arrest and deportation all appear to point to an acceleration of ICE’s deportation process.
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