New Hampshire is the only state in New England with local police departments participating in the task force model of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to carry out federal immigration enforcement, including serving warrants and detaining people suspected of being in the country without authorization.
New data show that those 15 local partnerships are contributing to an increase in ICE arrests in the state during the second Trump administration. Immigration arrests in the state have doubled in the last 15 months, compared to a similar period at the end of the Biden administration, according to ICE data obtained through public records requests by the Deportation Data Project.
A total of 429 people have been arrested, with local agencies making 51 of those arrests.
Top-ranking Republicans in New Hampshire, including Gov. Kelly Ayotte, have encouraged closer collaboration with ICE. Ayotte signed two laws last year that prohibited municipalities from limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
NHPR analyzed the data to look at where arrests happened, how many people arrested had criminal convictions, how many arrests resulted in deportations and what kind of people have been arrested.
New Hampshire is the only state in New England where local law enforcement has signed agreements with ICE. We wanted to understand how these agreements have been working as the federal government continues its immigration crackdown. This data also gives us a more detailed picture of who ICE is arresting in the state.
The 51 arrests made by New Hampshire law enforcement agencies remains well below those made by ICE in the community and transfers from county jails, state prisons or federal prisons – many as part of ICE’s Criminal Alien Program.
Most of the arrests in New Hampshire happened in the southern half of the state, especially through the ICE office in downtown Manchester.
The other arrests tended to group in places where there are county jails or 287(g) agreements including Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, which both have a 287(g) agreement through the sheriff’s office and a county jail. There were also 14 arrests in Cheshire County; the town of Troy has an agreement with ICE and made at least 12 arrests in the past year.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte, county sheriffs, and police chiefs have spoken in favor of these partnerships, saying that the programs are in place to apprehend dangerous criminals.
But the data present a more nuanced profile of the people being arrested in New Hampshire during the second Trump administration. They are split evenly between people convicted of a crime, people with pending criminal charges, and those that had another immigration charge on their record.
ICE assigns the people arrested a threat level, based on their criminal conviction. About 14% of people arrested in the state were assigned a threat level equal to a conviction for a dangerous, or violent crime. The rest were arrested for an immigration violation and waiting to be charged with a crime.
In the past year, ICE has arrested 429 people from 39 different countries. The majority of those arrested come from Latin American countries like Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Those arrested also have a clear demographic profile; young Latino men in their 20s and 30s made up 63% of arrests in New Hampshire.
Half of the people arrested by ICE in New Hampshire were deported. The majority were deported to their country of origin, but there were seven cases of a third-country deportation. In those cases, the individuals were convicted of a crime, except for a 58-year old Honduran man who was arrested in December for an immigration violation. He was deported to Ecuador.
A little less than half of the people had an open deportation order that predated their arrest — many had one for years. The other half were arrested first and received a final deportation order later. Among that group, most received their final deportation order within a month of being arrested, often the same day or week.
Roughly a third of people arrested have their deportation cases pending before a judge. Nationally, the Trump administration has been pushing people who are in the country unlawfully to voluntarily depart; 56 people arrested in New Hampshire did so.
There are some inconsistencies in the deportation data, since not all of the people deported received a final deportation order, and some that received a deportation order have not been deported yet.
