Masked men in the streets, day laborers rounded up, families separated. Those visuals, along with armed troops patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, are firmly associated with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that swept Southern California last summer.
But as dramatic as those stories were, data from ICE shows that compared to the rest of the country, arrests have remained relatively rare in most of California, and nowhere more so than in Northern California.
ICE arrested nearly 4,500 people in the San Francisco “area of responsibility” — which includes Kern County, home to Bakersfield, and all of California north of it — between Jan. 1 and Oct. 15 last year, according to agency data compiled by the Deportation Data Project. That gave the region a rate of about 217 arrests per 100,000 non-citizen residents, based on population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
That rate remained by far the lowest of any area of responsibility. Nationally, the ICE arrest rate was nearly 1,000 arrests per 100,000 noncitizens.
(Using noncitizen estimates isn’t the perfect way to measure how large ICE’s potential target population is. After all, most noncitizens are here legally, and the share of legal immigrants also varies by area. Still, they provide a benchmark for comparing ICE activity between regions.)