ICE record immigration arrests and deportations, Digi Mart USA News (Minneapolis): Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and deported more people during the last fiscal year than at any time in its 23-year history, Homeland Security said Thursday. The announcement came as President Donald Trump followed through on promises of mass deportations that helped him win back the White House in 2024, but also fueled political blowback that led to Democrats’ overwhelming victory in last week’s midterm elections.
The numbers reflect massive funding that has gone into expanding immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, including more money for deportation officers, detention facilities and deportation flights. Democratic members of Congress, buoyed by their sweeping victories in both the House and Senate, are promising vigorous oversight of the agency at the core of the president’s mass deportation mission.
ICE said it deported 483,200 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. In 2014, 405,090 people were deported under then-President Barack Obama, when some activists labeled him the “deporter in chief.” The 2026 figure was up nine per cent from the previous high of 442,640 in the same period a year earlier and up 78 per cent from 271,480 in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Details of ICE arrests remain unclear
Much remained unsaid in the DHS press release, including how many deportees had criminal histories and a detailed breakdown of the statistics. Deportation numbers can be fuzzy, with totals counted differently in different years.
The Trump administration has also largely stopped publishing regular data on immigration enforcement, instead releasing information intermittently through press releases or social media.
Marc R. Rosenblum, a visiting fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former top official overseeing statistics at the Department of Homeland Security, said it is accurate that ICE is making record numbers of arrests.
“They have record resources. They’ve doubled their staffing.
They’re getting a lot of support from other law enforcement agencies.” However, he said the sparse data means “we can’t really see what’s going on in any kind of detailed way.”
Homeland Security’s statistics office once published monthly data on immigration arrests and deportations, and ICE’s website had a dashboard detailing detentions, arrests and deportations. Both stopped at the beginning of the second Trump administration, raising questions about how many people the department is actually arresting and removing.
The conservative Oversight Project, which would like to see more deportations, has filed a lawsuit seeking deportation data from the government. Scott Mechowski, a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project and a former ICE deputy field office director in New York, said he is skeptical of the figures without more detailed information.
“Show me the data,” said Mechowski. “Even if the numbers are what they said they were, even then, it’s going to fall short of the president’s campaign promise.”
Questions about the deportation record
Trump campaigned on ridding America of criminal migrants, saying he would target the “worst of the worst,” but that is rarely the case. In July, only roughly one-quarter of deportees had criminal convictions, according to the Deportation Data Project, and more than half were not facing charges.
The numbers also fell well short of the White House goal of 1 million deportations annually, a promise made when the administration received billions in additional funding from Congress.
Trump returned to power last year promising to end illegal crossings at the southern border. His administration has pushed through restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration and sped up deportations.
Immigration crackdown operations are often deliberately high-profile, in part to frighten migrants into leaving on their own.
The biggest shift came earlier this year in Minneapolis, when more than 2,000 federal officers were deployed to the city and thousands of protesters turned out to confront masked and often heavily armed agents. Two U.S.
citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, were killed in confrontations with officers, and the administration quickly backed away from high-profile operations. Arrests dropped after the killings but quickly returned to record numbers in quieter immigration sweeps.
By last week’s elections, the White House’s immigration message had splintered, with some deeply Republican rural areas voting Democratic after residents saw longtime migrant neighbors, many of them key workers on farms, ranches and meat processing facilities, taken in arrests. The highest recorded number of deportations came during President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s crackdown on illegal immigrants from Mexico, a often-chaotic policy that saw deportations spike in the early 1950s, cresting at 1.1 million in 1954.
