When President Donald Trump returned to office this year after running a campaign that promised stricter enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, we knew we’d devote time and resources digging into how his policies would affect Utahns.
We’ve covered individual immigration-related arrests extensively, and our reporting has also touched on trends, like the rising number of local agencies signing agreements to work more closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But by midyear, we knew we didn’t have a good picture of the scale of Trump’s crackdown on immigrants here. So, we set out to learn how many people — and their families — had been caught up in the administration’s push for more deportations.
[Read more: How many Utahns have been arrested by ICE under Trump’s second term? Here’s the data.]
We found that ICE has made more than 3,000 arrests in Utah this year — with all but 88 of those coming since Inauguration Day — representing a 170% jump from 2024.
Deportation numbers are current as of late July. In the six months after Trump returned to the White House, his administration deported 975 people from Utah. In the more than 15 months before his inauguration, the federal government removed 849 immigrants from the Beehive State.
The data we analyzed came from the Deportation Data Project, a research effort at the University of California, Berkeley that files regular public records requests to agencies involved in immigration enforcement.
To figure out how arrests and deportations have changed under Trump II, we downloaded the raw data from the project’s website and filtered out non-Utah cases.
Crunching the numbers in Excel helped answer questions about who was deported (generally, since the data was anonymized) and when and where ICE took most of them.
The data was important because it helped us get a clearer picture of how these policies affect Utah. Equally important were the stories of the people behind the numbers.
We wanted to learn more about the experiences of Utahns who were arrested or deported by ICE. What was the process like for them? Where did federal agents pick them up? Where did they go? How did it affect their families?
Finding people who were willing to talk to us about their experiences was among the hardest parts of reporting this story. It took dozens of texts and no fewer than 27 calls to lawyers, advocates and others to connect with people who experienced the enforcement blitz, then verify their stories.
We talked to one man who had been deported to El Salvador, four men who had been arrested by ICE this year and a family member of another, though not everyone’s story made it into the final draft. The story could not have taken its final form had they and others not sat down for more than three hours of interviews.
We also scoured 63 individual court documents as we did background research into the men, their lives in Utah and their cases against the federal government, all in pursuit of fairness and bringing readers the most well-rounded story we could.
Similarly, we reached out to ICE with 13 questions about the men’s cases and enforcement operations in Utah generally, giving the agency multiple days to respond.
ICE never answered our questions.