Report: Trump’s ICE Has Deported 100K-Plus Aliens in 70 Days

A March 31 New York Post exclusive reveals that ICE has arrested 113,000 removable aliens and deported more than 100,000 since Donald Trump reentered office on January 20. That is a blistering pace not seen in more than a decade, notwithstanding popular media claims that Trump’s deportation efforts are lagging behind Biden’s in 2024.

“Deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Surged”. Here are the key paragraphs from the Post article, penned by the inestimable Jennie Taer and Anna Young:

Deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement surged above 100,000 since President Trump returned to the White House in January — as he maintains his promise to boot illegal migrants, alleged gangbangers and suspected terrorists from the United States, The Post has learned.

ICE officials have made 113,000 arrests and carried out “north of” 100,000 deportations since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, a Department of Homeland Security source told The Post Monday.

Seventy days passed between Trump’s inauguration and that article’s publication, which means ICE is deporting, on average, roughly 1,430 aliens per day, and more importantly arresting and taking into custody more than 1,600 illegal aliens daily. Let me explain.

According to the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), ICE “booked-in” — that is took into its custody — nearly 278,000 aliens in FY 2024, more than 273,000 in FY 2023, and 311,500-plus in FY 2022. That’s an average of 788 per day over that three-year period.

While that may sound impressive, the problem is that many of those Biden-era book-ins were quickly followed by “book-outs”, releases of aliens from ICE custody, for reasons other than the alien’s removal.

There were nearly 153,000 ICE book-outs for removal in FY 2024, 104,150 in FY 2023, and 56,500 in FY 2022 — 313,630 total or roughly 287 book-out deportations per day over that three-year period.

By contrast, according to OHSS, there were 106,490 ICE book-outs in FY 2024 for releases on either orders of supervision, the alien’s own recognizance, parole, or bond; 148,200 in FY 2023; and 249,000 in FY 2022. Add them up, and that’s 503,690 aliens whom ICE took into its custody and subsequently released into the United States, a daily average of 460.

Not to cast aspersions, but a cynical outside observer could reasonably conclude that Biden’s DHS was artificially pumping up ICE’s arrest numbers and then opening the back door to let the majority of those aliens free in the United States.

In that vein, those ICE book-in numbers between FY 2022 and 2024 were also inflated by a surge in illegal migrants under Biden who were apprehended by Border Patrol and handed over to ICE for detention.

OHSS’s ICE book-in and book-out numbers are not broken down by initial arresting agency (that is, ICE in the interior or CBP at the borders and ports), but 225,900 of those 503,690 ICE non-removal book-outs between FY 2022 and 2024 (45 percent) were parole releases, nearly all illegal entrants apprehended by Border Patrol and handed over to ICE, who were then released on parole.

Contrast that with what’s happening at the border under Trump.

In February, Border Patrol apprehended roughly 330 illegal entrants per day. Even if “border czar” Tom Homan wanted to take a page from the Biden playbook by moving all those border aliens into ICE custody to inflate ICE’s arrest numbers, it wouldn’t make that much difference.

As an aside, when I was at the border two weeks ago, officials told me that Homan’s not releasing any illegal migrants.

More importantly, however, these statistics show that the vast majority of ICE’s arrests under Trump are interior arrests — that is, arrests of aliens living in the United States who are removable on criminal or immigration grounds — not simply the detention of aliens already encountered by CBP at the borders and ports.

ICE can’t deport those aliens in the interior until it arrests them, and as the foregoing reveals, the agency is going great guns in that regard.

Biden’s Deportations vs. Trump II’s. Which brings me to the 100,000 deportations under Trump reported by Taer and Young. As I noted above, that’s an average of about 1,430 aliens who have been removed per day since January 20.

On March 10, NBC News published an article headlined “Trump deported fewer people last month than Biden a year ago, but border crossings have plummeted”. It begins:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported fewer immigrants in February than they did under the Biden administration during the same month a year ago, according to ICE data obtained by NBC News that has not been previously reported.

According to the data, ICE deported around 11,000 migrants last month, the first full month Trump was in office, compared to just over 12,000 in February 2024.

Either the Post is wrong or NBC News is (or DHS had an extremely busy March), but given that OHSS has published official DHS deportation numbers through the end of November 2024, my money’s on the Post’s sources being more accurate.

According to OHSS’s web page “Yearly Repatriations by Fiscal Year”, there were 102,760 DHS “removals” in FY 2022, 177,540 in FY 2023, and nearly 330,000 in FY 2024, for a total of 610,290, or fewer than 558 removals per day, not counting Title 42 expulsions and border and port “returns”.

“Removals” in this context are what both the Post and NBC News are calling “deportations”, so by that metric, assuming the Post is correct, Trump’s DHS is currently deporting 150 percent more aliens on a daily basis than Biden’s had been over its last three fiscal years.

And it has increased deportations with fewer removable aliens to deport, because of how few illegal migrants have shown up at the borders and ports since Trump took office.

To its credit, NBC News is quick to make this point:

One major reason for the higher numbers under the Biden administration was higher traffic from attempted border crossings, both legal and illegal, in 2024 compared to 2025.

People who were first arrested by Customs and Border Protection, which typically means those arrested at the border, accounted for most of the deportations in February 2024 under Biden.

That said, and also with that in mind, I have no idea where NBC News came up with its figure of “12,000” deportations in February 2024.

According to OHSS, that month there were actually 24,550 removals, with DHS returning an additional 41,700 aliens encountered by CBP at the borders and ports. Normally, media outlets conflate those two numbers to elide the lack of enforcement under Biden, even though such returns impose fewer legal consequences than formal removals do. What figures NBC News was looking at is anybody’s guess.

As Deportations Increase, the Undocumented Population Will Decline. Regardless of how you parse it, increased removals coupled with a decline in illegal entries under Trump means that the total unauthorized population in the United States is decreasing, a sea change compared to the massive increase in that population under Biden.

As my colleague Steve Camarota recently explained:

Evidence indicates something like 12 million new legal and illegal immigrants arrived during Biden’s four years. Because some immigrants already here die each year, and others go home, the net increase was “only” 8.3 million — larger than the individual populations of 38 states.

Illegal immigrants account for much of the recent growth. The Department of Homeland Security estimates illegal immigration by taking the number of legal immigrants in the country, a number we know reasonably well, and subtracting it from the total immigrant population recorded in government surveys.

The difference between these two numbers in January of 2025 was 15.4 million, an increase of 5.4 million (54%) compared to the January 2021 data.

Even if only a modest share of illegal immigrants are missed by the survey, the total population would be close to 16 million.

Of course, even at the current blistering pace of deportations it would still take roughly 30 years to remove all 15.4 to 16 million aliens here unlawfully, but that calculation is overly dire.

That’s because the unlawful population is not a pool that remains constant. As Camarota notes, some of those aliens will die or leave, and others will gain legal status in this country.

And as deportations increase, the number of aliens who opt to leave voluntarily in lieu of deportation will rise. That’s the reason why, even as ICE is expanding its removal efforts, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is rolling out an ad campaign encouraging aliens here illegally to “leave now”.

If the New York Post is correct, ICE is currently deporting more aliens than it has in over a decade, before “sanctuary” jurisdictions started throwing sand in the gears of immigration enforcement. If that continues, expect the illegal population to quickly decline as aliens decide to leave on their own accord before Tom Homan comes looking for them.