Map: Where ICE has been seen in Phoenix to date

Since Donald Trump resumed the presidency, community groups in the Valley have publicly reported nearly 140 sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. That number — equivalent to about one reported ICE sighting every four days — is almost certainly an undercount of those agents’ actions as they round up people around Phoenix.

Agents have been seen emptying records out of sports bars. They have armored themselves with masks and tactical gear to grab workers from taco trucks. They have stopped day laborers in Home Depot parking lots and at gas stations. They have violently pulled over commuters and truck drivers. They’ve then shunted hundreds of people into detention facilities with abysmal living conditions. Those detainees either get deported or released back into the country after months-long stays.

“Last year was already a tough year for our district,” said Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari, who represents parts of Phoenix and the West Valley, in a May interview with Phoenix New Times. “People were scared to go to work, to go to school, to just live their normal lives.”

A coalition of community groups, including Puente and the Borderlands Resource Initiative, contributes to a “community project” to collect and disseminate information about ICE sightings. Confirmed sightings are posted to the project’s social media accounts, including the Phoenix Rapid Response account on Instagram.

The groups have trained more than 3,000 volunteers to take calls on the groups’ Migra Watch hotline and confirm an ICE sighting. Confirmed sightings are shared so that Valley residents are aware of what’s happening in their communities.

“That might mean that somebody who works in the area is like, ‘Oh, I need to be aware of that. I’m glad that I know. I want to stay away from there,” Beth Strano, the executive director of Borderlands, told Phoenix New Times in August 2025. “But that might also mean that some neighbors are like, ‘I can go down there and I can film and I can offer support.”

This activity – essentially, describing the public activity of police – constitutes protected speech, First Amendment experts say, even as some Republicans claim it’s obstruction of justice. In 2025, Warren Petersen, the president of the Arizona Senate and the current Republican candidate for attorney general, asked federal authorities to investigate Democratic state Sen. Analise Ortiz for reposting one such ICE sighting alert on her Instagram story.

New Times has collected these alerts to plot a map of ICE sightings in the Valley since the beginning of Trump’s term. It reveals interesting trends about ICE activity, though it represents far from a full dataset. Many ICE sightings don’t get reported publicly because ICE “moves really fast,” Strano said. If a call comes in to the hotline more than 20 minutes after a sighting, ICE likely isn’t in that location anymore. So, the project only posts things that are “verified” and “active” — otherwise, “it’s just going to scare people,” Strano said.

Borderlands and other groups keep their own internal map, but they declined to share it with New Times, citing privacy concerns. Thus, what follows is an incomplete snapshot of ICE activity in the Phoenix area. New Times initially posted this story in early August 2025 and has updated it into mid-2026. Sightings are color-coded. The earliest sightings in dark blue, progressing to light blue, white, yellow, orange and then bright red for the latest sightings. View our interactive version of the map if you want to get more granular.

Where ICE has been seen in the Valley

As far as public sightings can show, ICE’s operation in Phoenix was slow-moving at first. Sightings were first reported in early February 2025 after ICE agents brought an armored truck, a dozen unmarked vehicles and flash-bang grenades to arrest one 61-year-old man in a Sunnyslope neighborhood. Despite the overkill, sightings remained low until late May 2025.

That’s when White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller tasked ICE officials with making 3,000 arrests per day. Shortly after that meeting, dozens of undocumented immigrants were arrested at immigration court in downtown Phoenix, with the administration using legal loopholes to expose them to deportation.

Then, in early June 2025, ICE sightings began to skyrocket across the Valley. Beginning on June 9 — after local immigration lawyers warned of incoming raids — ICE sightings and activity began to happen nearly every day, if not multiple times a day, in neighborhoods across Phoenix. That high level of activity has continued into late September 2025. That month, ICE activity also ramped up in San Tan Valley as ICE conducted a joint enforcement operation with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office called Operation Road Guardian. Many Latino men in work trucks were pulled over and detained, including a legal visitor to the U.S. who was released after more than 70 hours in custody.

ICE activity in Phoenix slowed down over the holidays, as only a few sightings occurred in October 2025 through December 2025. Still, that doesn’t mean ICE wasn’t in Phoenix. On Christmas Eve, ICE picked up a DACA recipient in a Phoenix parking lot. 

After the holiday slowdown, ICE activity and sightings picked up again in Phoenix in January 2025. Phoenix Rapid Response reported nearly 40 ICE sightings throughout the Valley that month, which is nearly 30% of the group’s total reported sightings. Among those sightings were the 15 Zipps sports bar locations that were raided late that month, which resulted in 39 arrests. 

That month, ICE’s Operation Metro Surge targeted the Twin Cities with violent, aggressive, very public arrests. ICE agents shot and killed protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The agency faced strong public backlash, which forced the administration to shift its enforcement approach to quieter, more targeted operations. Two months later, the head of the agency that oversees ICE, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was also fired from her post. 

Since January’s surge, public ICE sightings have significantly decreased in the Valley. However, ICE is still very much here, even as most public scrutiny has shifted toward the agency’s detention centers. According to statistics released in July by ICE, there were more than 43,000 arrests in June, which is the highest number recorded by the Trump administration. 

ICE’s traffic stop enforcement was briefly paused after two immigrants were shot and killed during these in Texas and Maine this month. However, those have since begun again.

The sightings map shows a smattering of ICE sightings in the East Valley, with most of the activity concentrated in central Phoenix and the West Valley – particularly in Tolleson, Maryvale, Glendale, Peoria and north Phoenix – which have a significant Latino population. Rich (and white) enclaves like Scottsdale are largely untouched, although work sites in Scottsdale have been targeted.

“They’re trying to hit these very Latino, heavy presence areas where they’re just showing up,” Ricardo Reyes, the executive director of VETS Forward, said. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. If you jump into Home Depot and there’s six, seven guys standing there, day laborers, looking for work, and then just running out and grabbing them.”

How are sightings reported?

The Migra Watch hotline model is based on other rapid response networks around the country, such as the grassroots organization Siembra in North Carolina. By calling 480-506-7437, Valley residents can report a suspected ICE sighting. From there, in an effort to weed out potential unrelated police activity happening across the Valley to verify the sighting, organizers work with the witness by asking a series of questions.

Volunteers will make sure the person calling is the witness to the event; if not, the witness must call. “That screens out the majority of false reports,” Strano said, citing people calling about things they saw on social media that might not even be in Arizona. Then, volunteers will ask what: What are you seeing? What are the cross streets? What kind of vehicles do you see? What about uniforms? Is there a business nearby? Can you give us landmarks?

These questions help organizers rule out activity that isn’t ICE-related and educate the community about what to look for. For example, Strano said the line constantly gets calls about an “old, beat-up work van” outside a particular business. That’s actually just the business’ vehicle, so volunteers can rule that sighting out. Instead, if ICE were in the area, you would see “fairly new vehicles that are in good shape” with “very dark-tinted windows,” Strano said. “And you would see them clustered together.”

If there is a business nearby, volunteers will call that business to ask about a sighting, as the people there are the “frontline workers,” Strano said. If there are “shoplifters getting arrested or whatever,” Strano said, volunteers can rule those sightings out. But if it is ICE, this call also immediately informs community members on the ground.

While this may seem like it takes a lot of time, Strano said it takes “usually about five minutes, maybe a little bit more” for the community project to post on social media, and “we only post things that have been verified through that conversation.” The vetting process is essential – organizers will post only when they have “really strong reason to believe that the information we have is accurate,” because they are “really opposed to false alarms and creating a fear culture.”

It isn’t a perfect system, and “it doesn’t mean there’s never going to be any false alarms,” Strano said. In early July 2025, the group posted an alert about ICE activity at 40th Street and McDowell Road. However, it was actually the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department conducting a raid on an illegal marijuana grow operation at the location.

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