ICE Arrests of Asian Immigrants Surge in California

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The second Trump administration’s aggressive and sometimes violent pursuit of undocumented Latino immigrants has become a political and social flashpoint. The impact on America’s Asian and Pacific Islander populations —including a tenfold leap in arrests in California from 2024 to 2025, according to an analysis by USC Dornsife’s Equity Research Institute — has received far less attention.

Even in Los Angeles County, home to the biggest Asian population in the U.S., about 1.5 million residents, the jump in arrests of Asian immigrants has been carried out so quietly that it has escaped scrutiny.

Sergio E. Fernandez, an immigration lawyer in Arcadia, recently represented an Indonesian immigrant who, like Jo, had entered the country on a visitor’s visa more than 20 years ago. Now in his 50s, married to a U.S. citizen and the father of U.S.-born adult children, he never applied for a green card.

After immigration authorities stopped him, he challenged his deportation in immigration court and reported to ICE when required. He did “everything immigration officials asked,” Fernandez said.

But when he showed up in August 2025 for a routine check-in, ICE detained him “without cause or reason,” Fernandez said. The lawyer called the man’s deportation officer, who told him the agency would process his client and he’d be out soon. But even though he did not represent a flight risk, and had a clean criminal record and his wife to act as financial sponsor, he spent about six months in detention, missing his son’s college graduation.

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But the arrests do have a profound effect on unauthorized immigrants themselves, including those who have had no contact with ICE. When Lin began her fieldwork in 2023, she often saw migrants gathered around places like Fatty Ding’s Plaza — a shopping strip mall in Monterey Park — employment agencies, and family-run motels. By April 2026, according to Lin, most of them had dispersed. Some had found work elsewhere, fewer newcomers were arriving after the new administration’s increased ICE enforcement, and many gathering spots had closed. If the immigrants had been barely noticeable before, they became all but invisible as they went about their days.

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Lin also watched the migrants’ outlook change. When she first met many of them in late 2023 and early 2024, they were optimistic, she says. They believed they had left an uncertain, anxious life in China behind and were starting over in the U.S. Many told her they planned to pay taxes, follow the law, and make the U.S. their home. When she spoke with them again in late 2025 and early 2026, many worried that their asylum claims would be denied, or that they would be arrested, detained, or deported. Those fears peaked during the ICE raids in Los Angeles.

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