Border czar Tom Homan said Monday that he is satisfied with the current numbers of deportations being carried out by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The Trump administration has deported 139,000 illegal immigrants since Jan. 20, the beginning of Trump’s second term, Homan said during a White House press briefing. The border czar further said that the Trump administration is exceeding former President Joe Biden’s administration’s deportation numbers because a significantly lower number of individuals are illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Last numbers [that] we got was 139,000 deportations. Am I happy with those numbers, the numbers are good,” Homan said. “Especially if you look at the ICE numbers. The ICE arrest removals are far beyond Biden. When I read the media, ‘oh, the deportations are behind the Biden administration.’ Well why? Because they counted border removals. We don’t have 10.5 million people crossing the border. We don’t have border removals. So Joe Biden could’ve deported 5% of his encounters and the numbers would still be higher than us on border removals because we have a secure border. The most secure border in the history of this nation.”
“Compare apples to apples, ICE arrests and deportations are far more than Joe Biden,” Homan continued.
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The administration has ramped up its efforts to deport illegal immigrants by adopting hawkish border policies and scrapping several of the Biden administration’s policies, such as catch and release. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on April 14 the administration aspires to deport “much more” than 1 million illegal immigrants per year.
The Biden administration had a monthly average of 57,000 removals and return in 2023, the last full year of the previous president’s term, according to Reuters. Border officials also encountered a record high number of border crossers during the previous administration, with encounters exceeding 2 million in the 2022, 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Just one month into Trump’s second term, border encounters reached the lowest numbers since the 1960s. Homan said during the briefing that the number of border crossings recorded in the last 24 hours added up to 178, a stark decrease from the 12,000 to 15,000 average daily border crossings during the Biden administration.
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