Axios’s Non-Scoop ‘Scoop’: ‘Trump’s Immigration Arrests Appear to Lag Biden’s’

Axios last week published what it described as a “scoop”, with a title that was both bombastic and noncommittal: “Trump’s immigration arrests appear to lag Biden’s”. Given the emphasis that the new administration has placed on immigration enforcement, that claim — if true — would call into question the success of the president’s efforts. Did deeper, however, and you’ll see that the “lag” actually highlights the success of President Trump’s border-enforcement policies — and the interior enforcement achievements of ICE under his “border czar”, Tom Homan. 

Immigration Enforcement, in Brief

When examining the effectiveness of immigration policies, it’s important first to understand that immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States – which focuses on identifying and removing aliens who are already here — is different from border enforcement directed at aliens who are encountered on their way into the country. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has responsibility for ensuring that “inadmissible” aliens – including illegal entrants — are not able to enter the United States at the borders and ports. 

CBP officers in the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) are responsible for stopping inadmissible aliens (who mix in with the flow of lawful travelers) at the ports from entering the country, while agents in the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) are charged with stopping inadmissible aliens crossing the border illegally between those ports. 

Such CBP stops are referred to as “encounters”, and in FY 2024 alone, more than 2.9 million inadmissible aliens were encountered at the borders and ports nationwide. 

Prior to March 2020, USBP encounters were referred to as “apprehensions”, whereas OFO encounters were called “inadmissibles”. Those terms are still commonly used, and most in the public and the press generally focus just on that critical USBP apprehension figure to judge how secure the border is. 

ICE is responsible for both detaining and prosecuting aliens who are encountered by CBP at the border and the ports and for “enforcement actions” (investigations, arrests, detentions, prosecutions, and deportations) regarding removable aliens in the interior of the United States.

ICE is also technically responsible for deportations of aliens who have been encountered by CBP at the borders and ports, and prior administrations have used ICE removals of aliens first stopped by CBP to make DHS’s immigration-enforcement efforts look more effective than they’ve actually been (i.e., “cook the books”). 

Consequently, as I’ve explained in the past, there are two key metrics you should focus on to assess DHS’s effectiveness in reducing the population of aliens unlawfully present in the United States: ICE arrests of removable aliens in the United States (“interior arrests”); and its removals of aliens from within the United States (as opposed to at the border), also known as “interior removals”.

‘Operational Control’

CBP’s immigration enforcement duties are largely reactive. If the number of inadmissible aliens entering through the ports or between them declines, CBP officers and USBP agents record fewer encounters, but are more successful in their duties from a “deterrence” standpoint — and “deterring and preventing the entry of illegal aliens into the United States” are the explicit goals of Trump’s day-one Securing the Border executive order. 

Basically, the president is implementing policies that will allow CBP to comply with the border security standard Congress has set out in the Secure Fence Act (SFA) of 2006 — “operational control”, defined in section 2(b) of the SFA as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband”.

Preventing “all” unlawful entries is a pretty tall order, which is why Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, constantly attempted to redefine “operational control” to suit whatever border policy the last administration was implementing at the time. 

Yet, if you read the Axios piece you will see that – for the time being at least — CBP is coming close to achieving that congressional operational control goal. According to the outlet: 

The publicity surrounding the new president’s tough talk on immigration has fueled a dramatic dip in the number of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally on the southern border.

Homan said this week that illegal border crossings have dropped 92% since Trump took office Jan. 20. 

That’s pretty close to operational control, and those are some of the lowest daily apprehension numbers in a quarter century. 

‘14,000 Immigrants Have Been Arrested’

From a national- and border-security standpoint, that decline in apprehensions would appear to be unalloyed good news. But not for Axios, apparently. 

Here’s how its article begins: 

U.S. agents arrested more than 21,000 unauthorized immigrants in November as President Biden’s term wound down — a pace the Trump administration doesn’t appear to be matching in its first month despite its crackdown, an Axios review of new data finds.

. . . 

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, says about 14,000 immigrants have been arrested in the three-plus weeks since President Trump took office.

That 14,000 figure comes from a February 11 interview Homan gave to WABC radio in New York City, and if you listen, it’s clear he was referring to ICE interior arrests. In fact, according to Homan, there were only 284 USBP Southwest border apprehensions the day before, which if accurate would be the lowest daily average since 1967.

Given that DHS under the Biden administration never published monthly ICE interior arrest figures, there is no way to determine how many there were in November. 

As I reported in late December, however, the agency made 113,431 interior arrests in all of FY 2024, an average rate of 310 per day. By comparison, according to Homan, ICE has now more than doubled that total, making 667 arrests of aliens in the interior on average per day. 

Put differently, ICE officers arrested one-eighth as many aliens in just the first three weeks of the Trump administration as they had in the entire previous fiscal year under Biden. At that pace, the agency will arrest nearly 245,000 removable aliens in the interior in a year, and Homan is plainly hoping there will be many more than that.

Anecdotally, I have been told some aliens in criminal custody are asking bewildered cops how they can sign for removal, apparently not appreciating the differences between local criminal incarceration and immigration detention under our federal system of government. 

If it’s true, you can call that the “Homan effect”, and I sympathize: I know the border czar and wouldn’t want him coming after me, either.

Math Is Hard

For a brief period in the early 1990s, Mattel sold a version of its “Teen Talk Barbie”, that, among other things, was programmed to say: “Math class is tough”.

Given that the doll appeared to denigrate the mathematical aptitude of the adolescent girls who make up its primary target audience, “Math Class Is Tough” Barbie quickly was taken off the shelves. Regardless, the toy’s message has subsequently been misquoted in memes — and in the distinguished Cambridge University Press — as “Math is hard”.

Math is hard, especially if you don’t understand the underlying figures. But you can trust me when I say that by any metric, immigration enforcement is significantly more rigorous in the early days of the Trump administration than it was at any point under its predecessor — and that the border is more secure, too.