DHS Pushes Back on Media Narratives: ‘Six Months of Keeping America Safe’

DHS pushed back this week against media narratives claiming its deportation efforts under the current administration have been lackluster with a fact sheet titled: “Six Months of Keeping America Safe Under President Trump and Secretary Noem”. For some historical perspective, here’s a dive into the current stats — and a few from the past.

Darien Gap Migration Plummets

The one immigration enforcement effort that even the president’s most implacable opponents agree has been a success is securing the Southwest border, where apprehensions of illegal migrants have dropped to all-time lows.

That fact sheet notes that, “Daily border encounters have plunged by 93% since President Trump took office”, but that is somewhat old news I have been reporting on for months now.

Much newsier is the fact that “migration through Panama’s Darien Gap is down 99%”, which may be the single biggest humanitarian achievement of Trump II. Let me explain.

As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) described the region in June 2024:

The Darién Gap is an imposing obstacle on one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. The remote, roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama consists of more than sixty miles of dense rain forest, steep mountains, and vast swamps. It is the only overland path connecting Central and South America. Over the past few years, it has become a leading transit point for migrants in search of work and safety in the United States, as authorities have cracked down on other routes by air and sea.

. . .

Many [migrants] pay to be led by local guides, or “coyotes.” Along the route are smugglers and criminal groups, including members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Gulf Clan, a paramilitary group and Colombia’s largest drug cartel. These groups often extort and sexually assault migrants. “Deep in the jungle, robbery, rape, and human trafficking are as dangerous as wild animals, insects and the absolute lack of safe drinking water,” Jean Gough, then regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said in an October 2021 news release.

I would take issue with CFR’s claim that the Biden administration “cracked down” on migrant air routes into the United States given the then-president was allowing up to 30,000 inadmissible aliens to fly into this country monthly on CHNV parole, but otherwise that is a pretty apt description of the gap.

My erstwhile colleague Todd Bensman was in the vanguard of reporting on the surge of “extra-continental” migrants pouring through the gap on their way to the United States, but other U.S. outlets followed suit, and they almost universally agreed that it was a humanitarian nightmare.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, went from describing transit through the gap as a migrant “rite of passage” in 2015 (when 2,000 of them passed through annually) to detailing widescale rapes of migrants in the region in September 2021 (when roughly 8,000 migrants transited — per month), to hailing a limited crackdown on crossings in March 2024.

More than 300,000 migrants crossed through the gap in 2024, but in May, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced that there were just 2,831 crossings between January and March — “a 98% decrease compared to the previous year”.

Trump’s border policies should receive all of the credit for that decline, as they remove the incentives for migrants to risk rape, robbery, and murder (and accidental death) to traverse one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous places by mandating that illegal entrants be detained and (usually) removed.

“Removed the Worst of the Worst Illegal Aliens”

There’s less agreement, however, on the success of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” program.

While “border czar” Tom Homan has promoted a “worst first” prioritization for arrests and removals in the interior, the president’s political and media opponents contend ICE is now detaining “immigrants with no known criminal record”, driven by an administration directive to “ICE to arrest at least 3,000 people daily, up from 1,000” at the outset of the administration.

The July 20 press release takes those claims head-on, revealing that the “administration has arrested more than 300,000 illegal aliens in 2025 alone”, 70 percent of whom were “criminal illegal aliens with criminal charges or convictions”.

When I was an INS trial attorney in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, few focused on criminal-history percentages when it came to immigration arrests and deportations, for a simple reason: Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) mandates the deportation of all removable aliens — criminals, overstays, and illegal entrants alike.

It was only under the Obama administration, when the White House was restraining ICE immigration enforcement efforts, that arrests of criminal aliens were prioritized and highlighted.

In any event, that 70 percent “criminal history” rate for ICE arrests under Trump II is roughly equivalent to Biden’s FY 2024 record, when 71.7 percent of ICE’s 113,431 interior arrests involved “convicted criminals” and aliens with “pending criminal charges at the time of arrest”, and it is much higher than in FY 2023, when just 43 percent of the 170,590 aliens arrested by ICE “had criminal histories”.

You don’t have to take my word for it; those statistics appear on page 16 of the FY 2024 ICE Annual Report, published by the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics in the waning days of the Biden administration.

The “Margaret Brennan Standard” for ICE Enforcement

Regardless, the media is flush with articles like one written by Margaret Brennan and published by CBS News on July 16, headlined “Despite vow to remove the worst offenders, ICE data shows less than 1 percent of deportees had murder convictions”. Here’s an excerpt:

Of the estimated 100,000 people who were deported between January 1 and June 24 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70,583 were convicted criminals, according to an ICE document obtained by CBS News.

. . .

Only 1.8% or 2,355 of the total convictions against those criminals had to do with sex offenses. Another 1,628, or 1.2%, were for sexual assault. The number of homicide convictions totaled just 729, or 0.58%, and the number of convicted kidnappers were 536, or 0.42%. About 10,738 convictions were for assault, or 8.5%, the data showed.

Brennan — objectively no fan of the president — likely considers those stats a knock on ICE’s recent enforcement efforts. But pull back and consider her figures for a moment.

Most, if not all, of those 2,355 aliens convicted of sex offenses, of the 1,628 aliens convicted for sexual assault, of the 729 convicted of homicide, of the 536 kidnappers, and of the 10,738 aliens with assault convictions arrested by ICE since January were convicted before Trump returned to office and were known to ICE under the Biden administration.

So why didn’t Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas direct ICE officers to pick them up? Did he think there’s a dearth of native-born kidnappers and sex offenders, or that “homicide” and “assault” fall under the categories of “jobs that Americans won’t do”?

“Six Republican Lawmakers”

That said, again, nothing in the INA bars ICE from arresting other criminal aliens, especially if they are here illegally and are removable on that ground as well.

Brennan continues:

Back on June 11, six Republican lawmakers who are members of the Congressional Hispanic Conference wrote to ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons to urge the Trump administration to prioritize the detention of violent offenders, convicted criminals and national security threats.

Would those “violent offenders” include aliens charged with driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Probably not, given that drunk driving isn’t a ground of removability (at least not yet).

Yet, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), “Every 85 seconds, someone is killed or injured in a drunk driving crash” in this country, with DUI taking one U.S. life on average every 39 minutes.

Every drunk-driving criminal alien ICE takes into custody makes our communities exponentially safer. Yet, under the standard advanced by those GOP members, such arrests should be minimized if not negated.

“Option Number Three”

As for those “six Republican lawmakers”, they are in the unique position in our constitutional order of holding the power to amend the immigration laws to their tastes and preferences.

But even if ICE were to “prioritize the detention of violent offenders, convicted criminals and national security threats”, what would that sextet have officers do when, during their “prioritized” activities, they encounter a non-violent, un-convicted removable alien who poses no national-security threat?

Simply ignoring such aliens’ illegal presence would be a de facto amnesty, but if the six want such an amnesty, all they need to do is draw it up and drop it in the hopper on the House floor.

As a rule, law enforcement officers looking for specific targets aren’t forced to ignore other individuals they find engaged in unlawful activities, and there’s no reason such restrictions should be placed on ICE.

Remember: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem isn’t arresting a lower percentage of criminal aliens than Mayorkas did; she’s just arresting more aliens, period.

Lawmakers have a choice: They can codify the feckless restrictions the Biden administration placed on ICE officers; they can legalize vast numbers of so-called “law abiding” aliens here illegally; or they can allow ICE officers do their jobs. Last November, a majority of Americans voted for option number three.