NEW YORK, June 11 (Xinhua) -- The Trump administration has ramped up investigations of companies suspected of employing undocumented immigrants, directing officials to meet audit quotas for such reviews to accelerate deportation efforts, reported The Washington Post on Wednesday.

"The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division has ordered its 30 regional offices to meet quotas on inspections of employers' documentation of their workers' immigration status," the reported cited immigration lawyers and former Department of Homeland Security government official. The number of notices of inspection, known as I-9 audits, has increased "tenfold" since January.

The inspections can be a precursor to workplace raids and have recently been used by the Trump administration as a method for detaining undocumented workers without judicial warrants. Often, undocumented workers never return to work after ICE agents serve an employer an inspection notice.

"The directives have resulted in an explosion of immigration enforcement across industries and regions," said the report. This month, ICE officials have detained hundreds of workers, including at a meat-processing plant in Omaha, gas stations in Phoenix, construction sites in Tallahassee and Texas's Rio Grande Valley, and a pallet manufacturer in Pennsylvania.

ICE has ramped up arrests broadly in an effort to follow through on a directive from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to make a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day, it added.

Those heightened efforts were on display last week in Los Angeles when ICE agents descended on a women's clothing manufacturer with a search warrant and also arrested day laborers at a Home Depot parking lot. The raids sparked protests that led President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard and U.S. Marines.