Senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are accusing the Biden administration of egregiously misrepresenting data to make ICE arrests appear higher than they actually were.
During a Wednesday press call with the media, senior ICE and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials touted the unprecedented efforts to arrest criminal illegal migrants during President Donald Trump’s first 50 days in office. Well over 30,000 ICE arrests have taken place since Trump returned to the White House, nearly matching all of the ICE arrests that took place in fiscal year 2024 under the Biden administration.
Officials also accused the prior administration of intentionally misleading the American public by falsely categorizing those processed under ICE and released into the United States as ICE arrests.
“[The Biden administration was] purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests,” ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons said. “Comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE and we found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests, when in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities.”
“The previous administration counted these arrests, even though no immigration enforcement action was taken,” Lyons continued, adding that “many” of the released migrants ended up being violent criminals and gang members profiled by the news. “During the Biden administration, ICE officers typically tasked with identifying removable public safety threats were instead reassigned to processing this unprecedented amount of illegal aliens that were crossing our southern border.”
The acting ICE chief said these actions resulted in criminal migrants being left at large across the United States.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division landed 113,431 administrative arrests during fiscal year 2024, per the agency’s annual report for that year. However, a senior ICE official Wednesday explained that the “vast majority” of this number included “pass-through” arrests, which are arrests of a non-citizen in which no enforcement actions were taken.
“They just passed through ICE before they were released into the interior and were told to report to an ICE office,” a senior ICE official said. “None of these arrests were made by ICE.”
In contrast, the Trump administration netted a total of 32,809 arrests of illegal migrants between Jan. 20 and March 10 — a figure senior ICE officials said does not include pass-through arrests.
Of all the ICE arrests that took place in the past 50 days under Trump, nearly half were convicted criminals and nearly another 1,000 had pending criminal charges, according to the DHS officials. A total of 1,155 of those arrested were also suspected gang members — a figure that is nearly two-and-a-half times the number of suspected gang members arrested in the same time period last year.
When entering office in January 2021, President Joe Biden issued a slate of executive orders aimed at unwinding the border enforcement apparatus built under Trump’s first term, and even went so far as to attempt a 100-day moratorium on deportations. However, as the border crisis began and grew worse under his watch, Biden shifted further right on enforcement policy, culminating in his signing of an executive order that largely closed the southern border to asylum seekers.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has issued his own flurry of executive orders and administrative changes — but aimed at freeing ICE agents to better complete their mission. The administration made so-called “sensitive locations” fair game for deportation officers, giving them far more freedom to conduct enforcement actions, and marshaled the resources of nearly every other federal agency to help in immigration enforcement.
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