Homeland Security officials on Wednesday accused the Biden administration of “cooking the books” to falsely pump up immigration arrest numbers by counting illegal immigrants who were caught and released rather than detained and deported.
A senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said more than two-thirds of the arrests ICE tallied last year were just “enforcement theater,” with the illegal immigrants quickly back on the streets.
“We found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when in fact these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into American communities,” said Todd Lyons, the new acting director at ICE. “The previous administration counted these arrests even though no immigration enforcement action was taken.”
He said once the numbers are more fairly compared, ICE’s arrests so far under President Trump look much better.
ICE officials said they recorded 32,809 interior arrests over the nearly 50 days from Jan. 20 to March 10. That’s close to the total for all of 2024, once the “pass-through” arrests are discounted, ICE said.
Among those were 1,155 known or suspected gang members and 39 known or suspected terrorists — that’s almost three times the rate of the prior administration, ICE said.
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A senior ICE official said the directive to count the pass-through arrests came from the Biden administration’s Homeland Security Department, which oversees ICE.
The official said the point seemed to be to benefit the illegal immigrants themselves. Once they had an ICE arrest, they could use it to show local governments they were in some legal process, which often qualified them for services.
“This gave them a pathway to establishing a long-term … residency here in the U.S.,” the official said. “These pass-through arrests, while they looked great, it really hindered our officers. We weren’t out there looking for the worst of the worst.”
Officials briefed reporters on the allegations as they seek to rewrite the narrative on ICE’s efforts early in the new Trump administration.
News reports have said President Trump is displeased with the rate of arrests and deportations, which fall short of the “mass deportations” he’d promised during the campaign.
According to ICE data, the agency was deporting about 645 people a day in the last weeks of February. That was down 17% compared to the same period in 2024.
That drop in deportations is largely explained by the drop in new illegal immigrants arriving at the border. While ICE handles arrests in the interior, it also serves as the main deportation agency for both interior and border cases.
Indeed, the number of border book-ins to ICE dropped from 628 a day in February 2024 to 163 daily this February.
ICE’s own book-ins — a measure of its interior arrests — more than doubled, going from 234 a day under President Biden to 632 a day now under Mr. Trump.
The result is that ICE is now holding 47,600 migrants in detention, officials said.
“We are maxed out,” the senior agency official told reporters.
