Has ICE Been More Active Under Trump?

Has U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement been more active under returning President Donald Trump? The short answer is yes, but not by as much as initially presented.

ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations, which are responsible for apprehending undocumented immigrants in the interior of the country, said that they arrested 20,000 people in Trump's first month in office, roughly corresponding with February 2025. Some estimations also put this number as high as 23,000 people based on ICE detainees at the end of February, but the new administration has also been observed to be releasing fewer people from immigration detention, which could be driving up this number.

20,000 ICE arrests in a month are a significant step up from numbers under the Biden administration in 2024, when ICE arrested fewer than 10,000 people per month, an increase of around 100 percent. A claim by the Department of Homeland Security that arrests rose by more than 600 percent has been deemed misleading as it compared all ICE arrest under Trump only to at-large arrests under Biden, which are a smaller subset of arrest by the agency. However, in late 2022 and early 2023, ICE under the Biden administration had arrested as many as 16,000 people per month during a time when illegal border crossings from Mexico into the U.S. once again surged.

On Sunday, new leadership was announced for ICE, following the previous reassignment of the agency's acting director on Feb. 21, as the White House is reportedly dissatisfied with the progress made on Trump's highly publicized mass deportation plan. According to media reports, actual deportations under Trump so far lagged behind average monthly figures under Biden in 2024. However, the numbers have limited comparability as Trump has once again barred many immigrants from entering the United States and presenting themselved to immigration courts, limiting the number of removals from the U.S. through this channel.

The administration has made several changes to potentially gear up arrests and deportations in the coming months, but reaching the goal of 1 million deportations in one year seems elusive. The use of military aircraft in deportations, for example, has been halted again due to the prohibitive cost, with flights to India having cost $3 million each and flights to Guantanamo Bay racking up $20,000 per migrant.