Border Czar Tom Homan boasted that since Trump's return to office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has made about 40,000 immigration-related arrests. The vast majority, he claimed, were "public safety threats and national security threats."
Yet, when stacked against the administration's own benchmarks, these numbers are smaller than the big promises made by the Trump administration. Despite a surge in immigration enforcement under President Trump's administration, recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data reveals that ICE arrests are falling well short of the White House's targets.
While arrests have increased compared to the Biden administration, with 20,000 detentions during Trump's first full month in office, ICE is still far from the 1,200 to 1,500 daily arrest quota set by administration officials, NPR reported. Daily ICE arrests peaked at 1,000 per day before dropping off, prompting the administration to abandon its daily arrest updates.
The latest DHS data shows that fewer than 600 individuals per day were booked into detention facilities in February.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem touted a 627% increase in arrests compared to last year, but critics have noted a misleading comparison between data sets. Noem cited 33,000 "at large" arrests under Biden last year, but didn't specify what type of arrests factored into the 20,000 attributed to the Trump administration's first month. "Custodial" arrests are significantly more common and are against persons already in the custody of law enforcement. In total, ICE made over 113,000 arrests in 2024.
Immigration experts argue the administration is prioritizing optics and high-volume mass raids over targeting high-risk individuals.
"It's not about public safety anymore," said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under Biden. "It's just about this volume number. And we are less safe for that."
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking controversial steps to boost its deportation objectives. Most recently, a coalition of immigration lawyers in Chicago accused immigration authorities of arresting a U.S. citizen and more than a dozen non-violent undocumented migrants unlawfully– in some cases, creating arrest warrants on the field after the targeted individuals were handcuffed.
Mark Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center told WBEZ Chicago that ICE agents might have felt pressure from the Trump administration's deportation objectives.
"In order to do this mass deportation that the administration has demanded of them, [federal agents] are going way outside the bounds of the legal guardrails around arrest and deprivation of liberty, both within the immigration laws but also under the U.S. Constitution," Fleming said. "[ICE agents] believed that they had developed a workaround the settlement, albeit an unlawful one."
An ICE spokesperson declined to comment on the ongoing litigation, according to WBEZ Chicago.
As the Trump administration keeps pushing its immigration objectives, observers have cited logistical hurdles such as a lack of detention space and massive backlogs in immigration courts slowing down efforts.
© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
