ICE agents take custody of a man at the Ventura county government center in California on 27 July 2026. Photograph: Blake Fagan/AFP/Getty Images After switching tactics, federal agents are detaining and deporting record numbers of people from the US When federal agents fatally shot US citizen protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January during the nation’s largest immigration-enforcement operation ever, it marked a turning point for the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Donald Trump in his second term had sparked outrage and huge protests with federal immigration officers descending en masse to one Democratic-run city after another in what some leaders called militarized “invasions”. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, then Minneapolis saw lines of masked and armored officers swaggering into town to conduct street arrests, ambushes of day workers waiting in Home Depot car parks for hire, and neighborhood sweeps.

Adults and kids were whisked off to detention and protests met with aggressive deployment of chemical spray, teargas, fists and batons. The killings in Minneapolis were the culmination of what appeared to many to be a federal shock force increasingly out of control while being defended by federal leaders – and public opinion broadly turned against this violence. There was a change of personnel and the administration flagged a switch to a “quieter” approach to immigration enforcement.

But while large-scale theatrics on the streets waned, less visible enforcement is no less aggressive on the ground today and continues to ramp up in multiple ways.

Here’s a timeline of how the administration’s anti-immigration campaign has evolved in recent months as Trump races to remove millions of people from the US. 2026 26 JanuaryMinneapolis madness leads to a changing of the guard Greg Bovino and other federal agents in Minneapolis on 13 January 2026, a week after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent. Photograph: Seth Herald/Reuters Two days after Pretti was killed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and 19 days after Good had been shot dead by an ICE agent, the US president announces that his “border czar”, Tom Homan, an immigration-enforcement veteran, will deploy to Minnesota, while Gregory Bovino, the border patrol’s confrontational commander-at-large, suddenly stands aside.

Bovino was the face and voice on the street of federal aggression; Good, Pretti and ICE watchers were the symbols of the resistance; and Liam Ramos was the image of collateral harm.

Then secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a press conference in New York on 8 January 2026. Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA Kristi Noem becomes the first cabinet secretary fired during the second Trump administration when she loses her leading role at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Noem was tainted with scandals over her close relationship with senior adviser Cory Lewandowski and a $220m advertising campaign starring herself and using a firm with connections to her former staffer.

She had also repeated a false narrative that Pretti “brandished” a gun at federal agents and called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Weeks later, Bovino retires and tells the New York Times: “I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens.”

Markwayne Mullin at a confirmation hearing for the position of secretary of homeland security in Washington DC on 18 March 2026. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA Markwayne Mullin, formerly a first-term senator from Oklahoma with “mixed martial arts fighter” on his résumé, is confirmed by the US Senate as the new DHS secretary. At his confirmation hearing, he says about immigration-enforcement officials: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”Oklahoma police shackle a man at the McIntosh county criminal justice center during an operation with ICE on 3 September 2026.

Photograph: Nick Oxford for the Washington Post via Getty Images The DHS, in its own words, has “supercharged” efforts to work with local and state law enforcement via so-called 287(g) agreements. From January 2025 these deals mushroomed nationwide, from 142 to 2,315, with most modeled as a “taskforce”. They deputize local and state officials to actively enforce immigration laws during regular police work – normally under federal jurisdiction.

By spring, this collaboration acts as a force multiplier for arrests, while allowing federal agents to avoid the spotlight as local cops take on more frontline duties. It also makes immigration enforcement harder to spot for protesters.

A family leaves after an immigration court hearing at the Jacob K Javits federal building on 31 July 2026 in New York City. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images Attorneys and researchers start noticing immigration court dates being scheduled for unusually large groups of people with little to no notice, in what they say is a tactic to increase the number of deportation orders without ever giving someone an individualized hearing.

These mass court dates balloon in June, affecting many thousands of people. Many more applicants struggle to find attorneys and prepare their now-rushed cases. Children are a particular target, too, being rushed through hearings as due process is undermined.

After the longest DHS shutdown ever, congressional Republicans use a partisan process to provide the department with an additional $70bn, funding it for the rest of Trump’s second term in a move that critics say undermines accountability. All told, the DHS has received roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars in funding since Trump retook the White House.

Demonstrators rally as the supreme court prepares to hear oral arguments in Mullin v Doe on 29 April 2026.

Photograph: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images The US supreme court rules in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who were legally in the US and protected from deportation. When Trump took office, 17 countries had active TPS designations, which allowed roughly 1.3m people who were already in the US to live and work legally while it was unsafe for them to return home. But under his second administration, more than a million people who are generally law-abiding and often contribute economically to essential industries with significant labor shortages have already lost their TPS permissions.

Now they face imminent risk of deportation to countries as dangerous as Afghanistan, Haiti and South Sudan if they do not qualify or cannot afford to apply for another immigration status.

“We’re going after them right now,” Mullin has said of Haitians. “These individuals can either self-deport or we’ll arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.”

Federal agents patrol the John F Kennedy international airport in New York on 23 March 2026.

Photograph: Olga Fedorova/EPA ICE significantly increases its collaboration with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to detain immigrants with expired visas – many of whom have pending applications for green cards, asylum, employment-based visas, etc – at airports, sometimes near public spaces such as ticket counters or gates.

However, the vast majority of arrests continue to occur where they are far less easy to detect and record on camera, such as in people’s homes and cars. The DHS reports 49,571 immigration arrests, which sets a new monthly record for the second Trump administration, after previously doing so in June. A majority of the people arrested in July have no criminal history.

Detentions also increase, with about 66,000 people in custody by the end of the month. Preliminary reports suggest immigration arrests in August have kept pace with July. A memorial for Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was fatally shot by ICE agents, on 14 July 2026 in Biddeford, Maine. Photograph: Ryan Murphy/Getty Images An ICE officer kills Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, in Biddeford, Maine, during a vehicle stop in which Durán was not the intended target, making him the 11th person fatally shot by federal immigration officials both on and off duty during Trump’s second term.

The shooting comes days after federal agents similarly killed another immigrant father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston while he was driving his building crew to their job. The DHS briefly pauses most ICE traffic stops until Trump intervenes, posting online: “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”In one 24-hour period, July 13 to 14, three people die in ICE-involved incidents.

AugustEven more local cops do ICE’s bidding Federal officials reach the milestone of 1,000 new287(g) agreements since 26 January, expanding collaborations with local law enforcement at an even faster clip than during the second Trump administration’s first year in office.

AugustVisa applications All visas for people applying to immigrate to the US are paused for an unknown amount of time while officials undergo training around the new “public charge” policies.

Markwayne Mullin announces the success of Operation Rotten Apple, in New York on 1 September 2026. Photograph: David Dee Delgado/Reuters Mullin retroactively announces Operation Rotten Apple, which from 27 July to 29 August quietly rounded up nearly 2,200 immigrants across New York state. The operation is a case study in how aggressive immigration enforcement continues, including in Democratic-led “sanctuary” cities, without the previous theatrics.

A migrant child seeking asylum waits to be processed by the US border patrol in Yuma, Arizona, on 3 May 2022. Photograph: Nicolo Filippo Rosso/Bloomberg via Getty Images On August 1 the federal government ends its contract providing more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children with legal representation. At the same time, attorneys report that immigration judges are taking a “deport at all costs” approach to their young clients, who suddenly are not receiving the time they need for their pending applications to be adjudicated by other agencies before they are ordered removed from the US.

Many of these kids qualify for a green card or other immigration status because they have been abused, abandoned, neglected, trafficked or otherwise severely mistreated, but their applications are often subject to backlogs and quotas that cause delays. In September, the Guardian reveals that Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, has been leading an unprecedented drive across several government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist, and, in some cases, flout federal law.

Taken together, these policy changes are less showy but they have ramped up arrests, detentions and the number of people forced to leave the United States – and put millions more at immediate risk of the same.

Many of these people have legal status or ongoing cases for winning or upgrading their legal status, or years of crime-free, honorable life in the US, but are being rounded up, often with little access to due process or attorneys who can help.

This latest iteration of Trump’s mass deportation campaign is no longer defined by federal agents patrolling cities with smoke canisters in hand. It’s much more insidious but also more ruthless and effective – and it’s happening everywhere.