The Trump administration is arresting illegal migrants at a break-neck pace, far outpacing the rate at which the Biden White House nabbed those living unlawfully in the country.
Federal immigration authorities have arrested more than 20,000 illegal migrants in President Donald Trump’s first month back into office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed Wednesday The number marks a 627% increase in monthly arrests in comparison to the roughly 33,000 at-large arrests made during President Joe Biden’s last year in the White House.
“President Trump and this Administration are saving lives every day because of the actions we are taking to secure the border and deport illegal alien criminals,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release. “Hundreds of thousands of criminals were let into this country illegally.”
“We are sending them home, and they will never be allowed to return,” Noem said.
If the pace continues under the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could arrest roughly 160,000 illegal migrants by the time fiscal year 2025 ends on Oct. 1, a figure that does not include the ICE arrests made in the few months prior to Trump’s return to office.
The second Trump administration immediately got to work overhauling the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus when the president retook the White House.
DHS quickly scrapped so-called “sensitive locations” for ICE agents, allowing them to instead perform enforcement actions anywhere in the country at their discretion. The administration swelled immigration enforcement manpower by granting agents within the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons with many of the same authorities as ICE agents — and later deputized IRS agents with similar authority.
The Trump White House is also putting sanctuary jurisdictions on notice. The Department of Justice sued both New York City and Chicago for local laws that prohibit cooperation between law enforcement and ICE agents, and Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the withholding of federal funding to sanctuary cities across the U.S.
The result of these efforts have been a monumental increase in ICE arrests, with deportation officers scoring nearly 1,000 arrests in a single day in January. Rather than remaining on the run, one illegal migrant located an ICE Detroit office on his own volition and surrendered himself to authorities.
The current pace is a far cry from the previous administration. Biden — who attempted to place a moratorium on all deportations in his first 100 days in office — oversaw a mere 74,000 administrative ICE arrests in fiscal year 2021. While the pace ticked up over his tenure, ICE arrest and deportation rates remained far below Trump’s first term.
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