President Donald Trump’s “largest-ever” mass deportation has led to the arrests of more than 32,000 illegal immigrants within the United States in his first 50 days in office, according to federal homeland security officials.
Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement touted the figure in an attempt to aggressively defend the Trump administration’s pace of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants, given the “millions and millions” of removals that he promised in his inauguration speech.
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“I want to be clear that the ICE arrests in the first 50 days of President Trump’s administration are outpacing those that were under the Biden administration,” said Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, in a call with reporters Wednesday. “As of yesterday, ICE arrests have surpassed all of last year’s at-large criminal arrests. Doubling ICE arrests is just the start.”
Of the 32,000 arrests since Jan. 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, aided by senior DHS and ICE officials in the call, maintained that the type of immigrants being arrested is different than who the Biden or Obama administrations went after.
During the Biden-era border crisis, overwhelmed Border Patrol agents caught and then released illegal immigrants into the country without giving them court dates. When those individuals later followed up with ICE once resettled in the U.S., ICE then counted each check-in as an arrest, which officials on the call said inflated arrest numbers to look bigger 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 past four years,” Lyons said.
Trump’s deportation promise and rate of arrests
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have touted plans to start arresting and deporting up to 1 million illegal immigrants with criminal records.
On Jan. 20, Trump previewed he’d “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 remove the people who have already been ordered by a federal immigration judge to be removed.
At last count, roughly 1.4 million people have been ordered deported and are still in the U.S., according to a November report by Fox News.
Trump’s deportation operation topped 2,300 arrests in the first week, reaching approximately 5,500 in 10 days. It hit 32,000 arrests as of Monday.
ICE arrests under Biden resulted in a total of 500,000 arrests during his four years in office, roughly the same range as Trump’s first term.
In Obama’s first term, more than 1.2 million people were arrested from 2009 to 2012, while roughly half that figure were arrested during his second term.
Did Biden deport more than Trump?
Deportation numbers were higher at the end of the Biden administration than at the start of the Trump administration, according to a comparison of figures.
However, the figures do not tell the entire story. The illegal immigrants that the Biden administration was removing from the country were largely immigrants who had just illegally crossed the border as opposed to illegal immigrants living in the interior of the country.
In the final six months of the Biden administration, the DHS expanded the number of removal flights it was carrying out in order to remove more illegal immigrants at the border.
Under Trump, illegal border crossings have dropped to the lowest recorded levels since 1967. In February, fewer than 9,000 non-U.S. citizens were arrested by Border Patrol along the southern border compared to roughly 60,000 arrests per month in Biden’s final several months in office.
With fewer illegal immigrants crossing the border, Trump has had far fewer to deport directly from the border, leaving him to focus on arresting and removing people inside the country.
Trump’s deportation promise and challenges
A lack of funding is what is delaying arrests from hitting higher levels, 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.
The Trump administration has already pushed aside its acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Caleb Vitello, after just weeks on the job due to concerns that arrests and deportations have not occurred fast enough, according to the report.
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The government is still relying on 2024 funding levels for ICE to carry out a much bigger operation than was done in 2024, when Biden had 271,000 immigrants, primarily at the border, removed from the U.S.
“[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,” one DHS official on the call stated.