President Donald Trump’s “largest-ever” mass deportation has resulted in the arrest of more than 32,000 illegal immigrants in the United States in his first 50 days in office, according to federal homeland security officials.
The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement promoted the figure in an attempt to justify the Trump administration’s rapid pace of detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, given the “millions and millions” of removals promised in his inauguration speech.
“I want to be clear that the ICE arrests in the first 50 days of President Trump’s administration have outpaced those during the Biden administration,” said Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, on a call with media Wednesday. “As of yesterday, ICE arrests had surpassed all at-large criminal arrests made last year.” “Doubling ICE arrests is just the beginning.”
Of the 32,000 arrests since January 20, 14,111 were convicted felons, 9,980 had pending criminal charges, and the remaining 8,718 had various immigration offenses, which Lyons said meant “they violated U.S. immigration law, which is also a crime.”
Lyons, who was joined on the call by senior DHS and ICE officials, insisted that the aliens arrested are not the same as those targeted by the Biden or Obama administrations.
During the Biden administration’s border crisis, overburdened Border Patrol personnel apprehended and then allowed illegal aliens into the nation without providing court dates. When those individuals eventually followed up with ICE after being resettled in the United States, ICE treated each check-in as an arrest, which officials on the call claimed boosted arrest numbers to appear larger than they were.
“We expect these ICE arrests and removal numbers will only go up as we unleash an agency that has had its hands tied behind its back in the past four years,” Lyons told the audience.
Trump’s deportation promises and the amount of arrests
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have announced plans to arrest and deport up to one million illegal immigrants with criminal records.
On January 20, Trump announced that he will “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
In addition to criminals, the Trump administration intends to deport people who have already been ordered by a federal immigration judge to leave.
According to a Fox News article from November, around 1.4 million people have been ordered deported and remain in the United States.
Trump’s deportation operation surpassed 2,300 arrests in the first week, reaching almost 5,500 in ten days. It has 32,000 arrests as of Monday.
ICE arrests under former President Joe Biden totaled 500,000 during his four years in office, which is nearly the same number as Trump’s first term.
From 2009 to 2012, former President Barack Obama detained about 1.2 million people, with roughly half of that number arrested during his second administration.
Did Biden deport more people than Trump?
A comparison of figures shows that deportation numbers were greater toward the conclusion of the Biden administration than at the beginning of the Trump administration.
However, the data do not tell the full story. The Biden administration was removing illegal immigrants from the country, mostly those who had recently unlawfully crossed the border, as opposed to illegal aliens staying within the country.
During the last six months of the Biden administration, the DHS increased the amount of removal flights it conducted to remove more illegal immigrants at the border.
Under Trump, illegal border crossings have fallen to their lowest levels since 1967. In February, Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 9,000 non-US citizens along the southern border, compared to around 60,000 arrests each month during Biden’s last months in office.
With fewer illegal aliens crossing the border, Trump has had significantly fewer to deport straight from the border, allowing him to focus on catching and removing those within the nation.
Trump’s Deportation Promise and Challenges
A shortage of resources is preventing arrests from increasing, according to White House border czar Tom Homan, who spoke with the Atlantic and confessed he is personally “not happy” with the amount of arrests.
According to the report, the Trump administration removed Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, after only a few weeks on the job owing to worries that arrests and deportations were not being completed quickly enough.
The administration is still counting on 2024 funding levels for ICE to conduct a significantly larger operation than in 2024, when Biden removed 271,000 immigrants, principally at the border, from the United States.
“[DHS] Secretary [Kristi] Noem has also called on Congress to act and get us the funding that the department needs to make sure we are targeting arresting and detaining these individuals who are in this country illegally,” according to a DHS official who participated in the conversation.
A stopgap funding plan to keep the government open through September cleared the House this week and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate. It would increase ICE’s funding to roughly $10 billion to assist with deportations.