President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar said that while the Biden administration’s latest deportation numbers appear high, they aren’t actually indicative of increased enforcement actions across the country.
More than 271,000 illegal migrants were deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in fiscal year 2024, marking the largest number of foreign nationals removed from the United States in a decade, according to a report released Thursday by the Biden administration. However, Tom Homan — a former acting director for the agency and the incoming border czar for the Trump administration — said these removals were largely a result of Border Patrol apprehensions and not indicative of immigration enforcement in the interior of the country.
“I’ve talked to sources at ICE and over 80% of those deportations were border apprehensions,” Homan told the Daily Caller News Foundation shortly after ICE released its enforcement data. “They weren’t ICE arrests, they were Border Patrol arrests.”
“Interior arrests are still at an all-time low,” he continued.
President Joe Biden entered office in January 2021 and immediately hit the ground running with a number of executive orders that began the process of unwinding Trump-era immigration measures and other decrees that limited enforcement actions, including a 100-day moratorium on most deportations. Biden’s efforts resulted in about 59,000 ICE deportations in fiscal year 2021, the lowest in the agency’s history.
While deportations began with a record low, they steadily ticked up throughout Biden’s time in office. There were roughly 72,000 removals in fiscal year 2022 and then 142,500 removals in fiscal year 2023.
However, Homan argued that the deportation numbers from fiscal year 2024 are largely a result of illegal migrants caught by Border Patrol and simply transferred over to ICE — not removals of illegal migrants caught by ICE agents in the interior of the country.
“Most of those were Border Patrol arrests, just processed by ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations]. This wasn’t really ICE work, this was Border Patrol work,” Homan said to the DCNF.
“Interior arrests are way down, this is an embarrassment for them,” Homan explained.
The incoming border czar went on to say that, beginning next year, these numbers will look small when the Trump administration embarks on a wide-scale deportation operation that will heavily target criminals across the U.S. The incoming border czar also accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of not sticking to his commitment of targeting criminal aliens.
“The number of criminals are a very small fraction of the total deportations,” Homan told the DCNF about deportations in 2024. “So even though Secretary Mayorkas has said they’re going to concentrate on public safety threats, the arrest and removal of criminal aliens is down 74%.”
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In a long-range interview with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), Homan detailed how morale among immigration enforcement agents has plummeted during the Biden-Harris administration. However, there appears to be hope from many of these enforcement agents, with Homan saying he witnessed “so many smiling faces” among Border Patrol agents during a meeting with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I’ve got thousands of people — retired ICE, retired Border Patrol, retired police officers, retired Army — that are begging to come and help do this thing,” he said on IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.
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