Trump vs. Biden on ICE Arrests, Removals

A recent Newsweek article claiming that 70 percent of the aliens detained by ICE don’t have convictions prompted me to examine ICE arrest, detention, and removal figures under Biden and Trump II. I was surprised to find that fewer than half of the aliens ICE arrested in the interior under the last administration had convictions or pending criminal charges, while roughly two-thirds of the aliens (1) arrested by ICE and currently detained by the agency; and (2) detained and removed by ICE under Trump II have criminal histories. Facts don’t lie, but sometimes you need help to understand what they are saying.

“ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics”

As an aid to pundits, reporters, and the public at large, ICE publishes a dashboard, “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics”, that details the agency’s arrests, detentions, expulsions, and removals.

Those statistics only begin, however, in October 2020 (the month before that year’s presidential election) and end in December 2024 (the month after the last presidential election). In other words, it essentially only covers the last administration.

ICE Arrests under the Biden Administration

According to that dashboard, between February 2021 (the first full month of the Biden administration) and December 2024 (the last full month), ICE arrested just over a half-million (500,842) aliens in the United States, in what are known as “interior arrests”.

Those weren’t migrants who came illegally who were apprehended by Border Patrol or stopped at the ports of entry by CBP officers — those were aliens already here arrested by ICE.

Of those half-million-plus aliens, just over 181,000 were convicted criminals (36.2 percent), a little more than 64,000 had pending criminal charges (12.8 percent), and the other roughly 51 percent — 255,585 aliens — were “other immigration violators”, aliens with final orders of removal or pending immigration charges.

ICE Detentions Under the Biden Administration

By contrast, ICE detained just over 1.107 million aliens under the last administration, through the end of December.

That seems like a fairly large number until you consider that Border Patrol alone apprehended more than 1.53 million aliens at the Southwest border (alone) in FY 2024 (alone), the vast majority of whom ICE is mandated by law to detain.

Of those 1.107 million ICE detentions, just 283,472 involved aliens who weren’t initially arrested by CBP at the borders and ports, but rather were the product of interior arrests.

Some 177,344 of those ICE detentions after interior arrests involved convicted criminals (62.6 percent) and just fewer than 58,200 of them had pending criminal charges (20.5 percent). The rest, nearly 48,000 in total, were “other immigration violators” (16.9 percent, more than half detained in New York City).

In other words, while just over half of the aliens ICE arrested in the interior between February 2021 and December 2024 had no criminal records (aside from illegal entry or reentry), very few of them were subsequently detained — which raises the question of why ICE bothered to arrest them.

ICE Removals Under Biden

Which leads me to the third major metric on that dashboard, ICE removals from the United States.

In that 47-month period, ICE removed almost 588,500 aliens from the United States, but only 147,533 of those aliens were “interior removals” — deportations of aliens living in the United States.

The remainder — nearly 441,000 aliens in total — were aliens first encountered by CBP at the borders and the ports and handed over to ICE for removal, a longstanding scheme to pump up removals my colleague Jessica Vaughan has referred to as “cooking the books”.

Of those interior removals, just fewer than 115,600 had criminal convictions (78.4 percent), 23,111 had pending charges (15.7 percent), and the rest, just 8,825 in total, were removed on immigration grounds alone.

Contrast those figures with court-ordered removals under Biden.

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), in FY 2024 immigration judges ordered nearly 310,000 alien respondents removed from the United States, on top of more than 231,000 removal orders in FY 2023 (DOJ’s FY 2022 statistics are unavailable). Most never were forced to leave.

Better yet, compare them with the 1.44 million aliens on ICE’s non-detained docket as of late November who had final removal orders and yet remained in the United States. Do the math and see that ICE under Biden removed just a fraction of the aliens it could and should have.

Politicians love to throw around the term “due process” in the immigration context, but that process is little more than kabuki theater if after aliens receive the process they’re due in immigration court, they aren’t removed from the country — but that’s what happened under the last administration.

ICE Detentions and Removals in FY 2025

As noted, the period covered by that ICE dashboard ends in December 2024, but other ICE statistics can fill in some of the gaps.

An ICE Detention Management web page links to a series of Excel spreadsheets, “Detention Statistics”, which cover the agency’s detentions and removals in the current fiscal year.

As of late August, ICE was detaining 61,226 aliens, 76 percent of whom were ICE arrestees (again, interior arrests) and 24 percent of whom came to the agency through CBP encounters.

Of the 46,595 aliens currently in ICE detention who were the product of interior arrests, 16,619 have criminal convictions (35.7 percent), 14,212 have pending criminal charges (30.5 percent), and 15,764 are “other immigration violators” (33.8 percent).

Roughly two-thirds of the aliens arrested by ICE and currently detained have criminal histories, and a similar percentage of the aliens the agency has deported from its custody under Trump II, do too.

In other words, nearly two-thirds of the aliens first arrested by ICE and detained by that agency had a criminal history. Even though it may be comparing tangerines and oranges, that’s a larger percentage than the less than half of ICE interior arrests under Biden involving aliens with criminal histories.

That spreadsheet also shows that in FY 2025, 191,393 aliens were released from ICE detention for removal, and that just less than 141,000 of those aliens were removed after February 2025, the first full month of the Trump administration.

Keep in mind that those statistics are not broken down by initial arresting agency. But given that the number of illegal border-crossers has plummeted since Trump’s return, it’s safe to assume that most of those removals came after ICE interior arrests.

That’s particularly likely given that, of those Trump-era ICE removals of aliens from its custody, 41.4 percent (58,430) had criminal convictions, 25 percent had pending criminal charges (35,299), and 33.5 percent (47,195) were “other immigration violators”.

Again, roughly two-thirds of the aliens removed by ICE after ICE detention under Trump II had criminal histories.

Those aren’t all the aliens removed under Trump, either, as others received removal orders while in criminal proceedings and were simply transported out for removal.

During a recent trip to south Texas, I saw some of those deportations in action, when I came upon a group of aliens just released from criminal custody being dropped off by ICE at the Del Rio port of entry to walk across the bridge to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

Fortunately, my Spanish is not very good, because some of them were neither happy to see me nor to have to leave.

“Trump Admin Says 70% of ICE Detainees Do Not Have Criminal Convictions”

Which brings me to an August 29, 2025, Newsweek article headlined, “Trump Admin Says 70% of ICE Detainees Do Not Have Criminal Convictions”.

That article relied on the same Detention Management web page I cited above, as is clear from the second paragraph: “The latest detention management stats from ICE showed a record 61,226 people were being held in ICE facilities across the country as of August 29.”

Of course, to get to the 70 percent figure in the headline, you must add illegal entrants first encountered by CBP — not arrested by ICE in the interior — into the ICE detention total.

Respectfully, it’s not ICE’s fault that more criminals aren’t coming here illegally (not that anyone, save a select few, wants that), or that Congress requires the agency to detain those migrants regardless of whether they are criminals or not.

That article does include the following caveat: “As of Friday, out of the 61,226 detainees, 18,205 were convicted criminals, 15,593 had pending criminal charges, and 27,428 were being held on other immigration violations, reflecting normal trends for ICE detention.” (Emphasis added.)

That, of course, raises the question of how the author defines “normal trends for ICE detention”, but in that vein, I’d argue that the Biden administration was the outlier in not detaining more “other immigration violators” ICE had already arrested than the Trump administration was for keeping them in custody.

And I should know, having been an INS prosecutor under President Clinton and an immigration judge in a detained court under both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

“Immigrants Residing in the Country … Legally, with Valid Documentation … Detained”

But I digress. Note the aforementioned caveat appeared in the eighth paragraph of that article, whereas this is from paragraph five, under the subheading “Why It Matters”:

Immigrants residing in the country illegally and legally, with valid documentation such as green cards and visas, as well as those with criminal histories, have been detained. Many with past convictions, even from decades ago, have found themselves in ICE custody despite spending years without facing serious immigration problems.

That sounds unkind unless you click on the link for the “valid documentation” part, which sends you to a separate May 21 Newsweek article, “Green Card Holder Detained by ICE at Immigration Appointment, Wife Says”.

It tells the story of a Danish national arrested by ICE when he went to a naturalization appointment, over what his wife described as “a paperwork miscommunication from 2015”.

The next paragraph, however, explains that according to DHS, the “green card holder” in question was ordered deported in April 2019. With all due respect, if that’s a “paperwork miscommunication”, I handed out thousands of them in my eight years on the bench.

The link for “many with past convictions”, on the other hand, takes you to an August Newsweek article about “a refugee who arrived from Vietnam over 40 years ago and obtained a lawful permanent resident status, or green card, soon after”. He was recently detained at an ICE call-in.

Had his story ended there, he’d have been fine, except that he was convicted of robbery eight years after he came here and thereafter “violated probation after a subsequent burglary charge”.

Granted, his criminal history ended in the past, but there’s no statute of limitations on either removal orders or on the criminal convictions that render aliens removable. Congress could always add such limitations to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), but ICE is bound by the law now.

The Laken Riley Act

And if anything, ICE is even more bound by the law today. Let me explain.

The reason why ICE agents and officers failed to arrest, detain, and remove more aliens — criminals and “other immigration violators” alike — over the past four years is because the Biden administration, and then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to be specific, wouldn’t let them.

In September 2021, Mayorkas issued “guidelines” that tightly restricted such ICE “enforcement actions” by requiring the agency to consider various “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors before it could even investigate facially removable aliens, including criminals.

The problem is: (1) those factors don’t appear in the INA; but (2) the INA does require ICE to arrest and detain most of those criminals. Nonetheless, when Texas and other states sued the administration to force it to comply with the statutory detention mandates, Biden’s DOJ fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the Mayorkas guidelines in place.

“Successfully fought”, I might add, as the High Court concluded the states lacked standing.

To reassert its authority over immigration enforcement and protect states from criminals, the first bill Congress passed in its latest session was S.5, the “Laken Riley Act”, named after a Georgia student slain by an illegal migrant released under Biden.

That law grants state attorneys general standing in federal court to challenge DHS non-detention decisions, including when ICE fails to detain aliens subject to detention on criminal grounds and CBP releases aliens at the borders and ports on “parole”.

The act actually goes one step further by also requiring ICE to also arrest and detain aliens with pending criminal charges for “burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, or assault of a law enforcement officer offense, or any crime that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person”.

“Egregious Crimes”

One last point raised in the latest Newsweek article is that there’s no way to tell whether the criminal aliens ICE is arresting and detaining have been charged with or convicted of so-called “egregious crimes”.

Respectfully (once more), whether a crime is “egregious” or not is wholly subjective (ask any victim), but also irrelevant.

Congress decides what crimes subject aliens to mandatory detention and removal, but drunk driving (which isn’t a removable offense) is likely a more serious danger to the community than tax evasion (which is, and an aggravated felony when you cheat the government out of more than $10,000).

Statistics don’t lie, but they often need analysis. Here’s the key takeaway: Roughly two-thirds of the aliens arrested by ICE and currently detained have criminal histories, and a similar percentage of the aliens the agency has deported from its custody under Trump II, do too. Don’t believe the headlines.