On a recent afternoon, Robert Perry, a retired pastor, was driving to visit an immigrant at a southwest Missouri jail when he learned the man was no longer there.
Since November, Perry, 81, has visited 22 people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally at the Greene County jail, after he connected with a chapter of Abide in Love, a group that supports immigrants. The jail in Springfield has seen an influx of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees. On any given day, 250 to 300 ICE arrestees are being held, he said.
The man Perry was going to see was seeking asylum after his family members were killed by a drug cartel in his home country. Now, the man's wife and attorneys did not know if the father of four had been transferred to another facility or deported.
"We're all trying to find out what's happened to him," Perry said Tuesday.
Similar scenes have played out across Missouri, where immigration arrests have spiked during President Donald Trump's second term, nearly tripling compared with a similar timeframe under President Joe Biden.
Since January 2025, more than 3,200 people from nearly 80 countries have been arrested by ICE in Missouri, according to new figures released by the Deportation Data Project, which obtained ICE data through a public records lawsuit. That's 2.7 times the number of unauthorized immigrants arrested in Missouri during a similar window at the end of the Biden administration, when 1,200 people were taken into custody.
"When the administration indicated that they were going to detain everyone, that's what they're doing," said Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City attorney who has been an immigration litigator for more than 25 years.
The Department of Homeland Security said neither it nor ICE has verified the accuracy of the data released by the Deportation Data Project.
DHS provided the Midwest Newsroom with the names of five men it considered among the "worst of the worst" arrested by ICE in Missouri. Two of them, one from Vietnam and the other from Cuba, were convicted in killings. The other three, who were from the United Kingdom or Mexico, were convicted of sexual offenses, some involving a minor, DHS said.
"Everyday ICE is removing barbaric criminal illegal aliens from American communities," DHS said in a statement.
Roughly 20% arrested in Missouri under Trump had no criminal conviction or charges. That figure was higher under Biden, when half of people arrested had no convictions or charges.
Since Trump retook office, nearly 1,245 Mexican citizens alone have been arrested in Missouri. Another 640 were from Guatemala and more than 560 from Honduras, according to the data, which encompasses arrests up to March 10. About 30 were younger than 18, including a boy under 3. The oldest person deported was an Irish woman in her 80s.
As arrests have climbed, attorneys have not seen many raids like the ones in Minnesota because in Missouri, more local police cooperate with ICE. Immigrants are often turned over after traffic stops in the state. Sharma-Crawford called some examples "pretty outrageous," including when truck drivers stop at weigh stations, show documents of pending applications and are then held for hours until ICE picks them up, which is similar to a tactic being used in Iowa.
Immigrant advocates said they've seen ICE use strategies in the St. Louis area different from those used in parts of rural Missouri.
"We have a really extensive police-to-ICE pipeline that is serving to funnel thousands of Missourians into the detention and deportation machine," Sara Ruiz, executive director of the Ashrei Foundation, said of the St. Louis region.
Raymond Bolourtchi, an immigration attorney in St. Louis, who himself is a naturalized U.S. citizen, called the deputization of local law enforcement the "most dramatic" and disheartening change he's seen.
One of his clients was detained after her minivan was struck by a reckless driver. She was a victim in the crash, but since she did not have a driver's license, she was detained. Similarly, immigrants who are victims of crimes, like domestic violence, now fear dialing 911.
"The effect on the community is chilling," Bolourtchi said.
Early last year, immigrant advocates and attorneys in St. Louis created a rapid response hotline to report ICE activity and offer guidance. That hotline has received more than 5,000 calls — the majority of which were from relatives of a person in, or heading to, ICE custody, Ruiz said.
The site of an arrest is not always precise in ICE data. The highest number of locations, nearly 880, are listed as "STL GENERAL NON-SPECIFIC."
Asked what that region encompasses, a DHS spokesperson said ICE does not discuss its ongoing or future operations.
Police and jail agreements
Missouri has the fourth-highest number of local agencies participating with ICE, behind Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania, data shows.
More than 60 police departments and sheriff's offices, many of which are in the southern half of the state, have signed a formal ICE agreement. That includes the Missouri Highway Patrol, which said 51 troopers, or 3% of the force, have been certified for immigration enforcement.
"The Patrol is not involved in any targeted immigration enforcement operations," Lt. Eric Brown said in an email, noting that "enforcement investigations" are the result of normal trooper duties, such as traffic stops, criminal investigations and calls for service.
Attorneys critical of such agreements said local officers don't understand the nuances of complex immigration law.
"It's gotten to the point of, if you don't speak English or you look brown, or they simply can't understand the documents, they're going to detain for ICE," Sharma-Crawford said.
Immigrants have been picked up at police departments, sheriff's offices and correctional facilities across the state. They include 52 from the Greene County Sheriff's Office, 129 from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office and 80 from the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield.
In St. Charles County, officials recently tried to dispel anxieties about its partnership with ICE, vowing it would not result in a "Minneapolis situation," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
In Illinois and Minnesota, state laws prohibit ICE from detaining people within their borders, so many immigrants arrested there have been brought to and housed in Missouri — ballooning the figures of immigrants detained in the state, Sharma-Crawford said.
Across the western state line in Leavenworth, Kansas, a 1,000-bed ICE detention center opened in recent weeks. Within Missouri, local jails contract with ICE, including in Greene County, where many of the detainees were arrested in other states.
Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott, whom Trump recently nominated to be the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Missouri, has said he in part views housing ICE detainees from a "business perspective." His office did not return a recent call seeking comment.
"With ICE inmates, you can see I'm making a profit," Arnott told KY3, a Springfield TV station, in September. "Those beds would go totally unused. So that's $8 more million that supplements the local taxpayer to fund running the jail."
Last year, two ICE detainees reportedly died by suicide in Missouri: Leo Cruz-Silva, a 34-year-old Mexican immigrant at the Ste. Genevieve jail, and Brayan Garzón-Rayo, a 27-year-old Colombian man at the Phelps County jail.
In some parts of the state, elected officials have moved to prevent detention: Kansas City passed a five-year moratorium on non-municipal facilities after ICE eyed a warehouse as a detention center. In St. Louis, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, of the 7th Ward in south city, proposed a similar ordinance.
'Families broken up'
Immigration arrests have skyrocketed even more in Illinois, from about 1,590 to more than 6,400, in the 13-month timeframe analyzed by the Midwest Newsroom. ICE arrests also jumped in Kansas, from about 750 to nearly 2,500, the new data shows.
In Springfield, Missouri, Perry, the retired pastor, said some immigrants he's visited were brought to the U.S. as children and received President Barack Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status.
Others were arrested at a court hearing or routine ICE check-in, Perry said. In St. Louis, about 160 people have been arrested since early 2025 at an ICE office.
Most of the immigrants Perry has spent time with are in their 20s and 30s. They include women separated from their children, including a child with a developmental disorder, and have had "their families broken up," he said.
"This stuff about ICE picking up the worst of the worst," Perry said, "has not been my experience at all."
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METHODOLOGY
For this story, reporter Luke Nozicka analyzed data obtained and published by the Deportation Data Project on immigration arrests across Missouri. The dataset does not always list which state an arrest occurred in, so it represents an undercounted estimate. He interviewed immigration attorneys, immigrant advocates and a minister to better understand how immigration enforcement is being carried out in various parts of the state. He also sought comments from ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
REFERENCES
Dataset: ICE Administrative Arrests | Deportation Data Project | March 2026
Dataset: ICE Detention Stays | Deportation Data Project | March 2026
ICE's 287(g) Program Map | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement | April 2026
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News – Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Copyright 2026 St. Louis Public Radio
