ICE reports record-high immigration arrests and deportations since Trump's return to White House
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — 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, as President Donald Trump followed through on promises of mass deportations that helped him win back the White House in 2024 but also fueled the political blowback that led to Democrats’ overwhelming victory in last week’s midterm elections.
The numbers released Thursday by the department reflect the massive funding that has gone into supercharging immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, with more money for deportation officers, detention facilities and deportation flights.
But Democratic members of Congress, buoyed by their sweeping victories in both the House and Senate, are promising vigorous oversight of the agency core to 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 number was up 9% from its previous high of 442,640 in the same period a year earlier and up 78% 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.
Yet much remained unsaid in the DHS press release, including how many deportees had criminal histories and a detailed breakdown of the statistics. In addition, deportation numbers can be notoriously fuzzy, with totals counted in different ways in different years. And the Trump administration largely stopped publishing regular data on immigration enforcement once it took office, instead releasing information intermittently in press releases or on social media without the detailed data reports that it used to deliver.
“It is accurate that ICE is making record numbers of arrests,” said Marc R. Rosenblum, a visiting fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former top official overseeing statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. “They have record resources. They've doubled their staffing. They’re getting a lot of support from other law enforcement agencies.”
But the sparse data in Thursday's announcement means “we can't really see what’s going on in any kind of detailed way.”
Homeland Security's statistics office used to publish data monthly about immigration arrests and deportations, while ICE's website used to have a dashboard detailing information about ICE detentions, arrests and deportations. But that stopped at the beginning of the second Trump administration, raising questions about how many people the department was actually arresting and removing from the country.
The conservative Oversight Project, which would like to see the administration carry out more deportations, has filed a lawsuit seeking to get deportation data from the government.
Scott Mechowski is a visiting fellow for deportation studies at the Oversight Project and used to be ICE’s deputy field office director for enforcement and removal operations in New York. He said without more detailed information from the department about how they're counting deportations and what they're including, he's skeptical of the figures released Thursday.
“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.”
The Oversight Project has released a report detailing how the administration can reached the promised million deportations a year, including by ramping up arrests and enforcement at worksites.
Trump had campaigned on ridding America of criminal migrants, saying he’d be targeting the “worst of the worst.”
But that is rarely the case. In July, for instance, only roughly one-quarter of deportees had criminal convictions, according to the Deportation Data Project. More than half weren't even facing charges.
The numbers released Thursday also fell well short of the White House goal of 1 million deportations annually, a promise it made when it received billions in additional funding from Congress, supercharging the government's immigration bureaucracy.
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 speeded up deportations. Immigration crackdown operations are often purposefully high-profile, in part to frighten migrants into leaving of their own accord.
But the crackdown hasn't always gone as planned.
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 spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles.
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.
While arrests dropped after the killings, they quickly returned to record numbers, albeit in quieter immigration sweeps.
By last week's elections the White House's immigration message had splintered, with even some deeply Republican rural areas voting Democratic after people 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 on record came during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s crackdown on illegal immigrants from Mexico. The often-chaotic policy saw deportation numbers spike dramatically in the early 1950s, cresting at 1.1 million in 1954.
__
Associated Press writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
