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 touted the figure in an attempt to justify the Trump administration’s rapid pace of arresting 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, in a call with reporters 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 criminals, 9,980 had pending criminal charges, and the remaining 8,718 had other immigration violations, which Lyons noted 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 immigrants arrested are not the same as those targeted by the Biden or Obama administrations.
During the Biden administration’s border crisis, overburdened Border Patrol agents apprehended and then released illegal immigrants into the country without providing court dates. When those individuals later followed up with ICE after being resettled in the United States, ICE counted each check-in as an arrest, which officials on the call claimed inflated 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 rate 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 would “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 wants to deport people who have already been ordered by a federal immigration judge to leave.
According to a Fox News report from November, approximately 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 around 5,500 in ten days. It had 32,000 arrests as of Monday.
ICE arrests under former President Joe Biden totaled 500,000 during his four years in office, which is roughly the same number as Trump’s first term.
From 2009 to 2012, former President Barack Obama arrested over 1.2 million people, with roughly half of that number arrested during his second term.
Did Biden deport more people than Trump?
A comparison of figures shows that deportation numbers were higher at the end of the Biden administration than at the beginning of the Trump administration.
However, the figures do not tell the full story. The Biden administration was removing illegal immigrants from the country, primarily those who had recently illegally crossed the border, as opposed to illegal immigrants living within the country.
During the last six months of the Biden administration, the DHS increased the number 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 arrested fewer than 9,000 non-US citizens along the southern border, compared to approximately 60,000 arrests per month during Biden’s last months in office.
With fewer illegal immigrants crossing the border, Trump has had far fewer to deport directly from the border, allowing him to focus on arresting and removing people within the country.
Trump’s Deportation Promise and Challenges
A lack of funding is preventing arrests from increasing, according to White House border czar Tom Homan, who spoke with the Atlantic and admitted he is personally “not happy” with the number 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 due to concerns that arrests and deportations were not being completed quickly enough.
The government is still relying on 2024 funding levels for ICE to conduct a much larger operation than in 2024, when Biden removed 271,000 immigrants, primarily 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 bill to keep the government open through September passed the House this week and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate. It would increase ICE’s funding to nearly $10 billion to assist with deportations.