Little Empirical Evidence That Arrests and Removals Are Higher Under Trump

Published Feb 25, 2025

While ICE has been waging a media campaign on its “stepped up enforcement,” a more careful examination shows little evidence that actual immigration arrests and removals have increased over the Biden administration’s record for FY 2024 through January 2025.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publishes semi-monthly statistics that are legislatively mandated by the annual Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Acts Congress has passed. TRAC recently released a report on February 21, 2025, tracking the number of detained individuals reported by ICE. It showed that a total of 39,703 were detained on January 12, 2025, at the last available report at the end of the Biden presidency. The latest ICE report as of February 9, 2025, after the change in administrations, brought a new total of detained individuals to 41,169, an increase of 1,466 (3.7%) in the number of detainees over two weeks. Levels may have been constrained by the availability of detention beds.

However, the number detained also reflects new arrests of immigrants booked into detention as compared with the number of those released. The detained population can rise because book-ins increase, but levels are also impacted by the number of detainees who are released under bond as well as those who left custody and were actually deported.

The same congressionally mandated reports that document detention levels also provide monthly totals for initial ICE book-ins following an ICE arrest and fiscal year totals for ICE removals. This report utilizes differences between numbers in each subsequent update in FY 25 to understand recent trends in arrests and removals.

Lower Rate of ICE Arrests in February than Biden’s Record

Arrests of noncitizens who were initially booked into ICE detention facilities are provided as monthly totals which are tracked in this congressionally mandated series. TRAC compiles these numbers on its QuickFacts page and provides a detailed time series going back to October 2018. During FY 2024, an average of 759 noncitizens each day entered ICE custody.[1] Fiscal Year 2024 covered the period October 2023 through September 2024.

Figures for the initial months of FY 2025 show that October 2024 had essentially the same average of 762 people entering ICE custody each day. Figures dropped modestly to 704 people in November and 714 entering custody on a daily basis in December 2024. These last two months include the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons, weeks during which ICE generally reduces its enforcement actions, thus lowering the monthly total.

These same semi-monthly statistics don’t divide January neatly into before and after the change in presidential administrations. However, the series does capture the last 6 days of January of the new Trump administration when daily book-ins jumped to 1,126.

As ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have acknowledged,[2] arrest levels then dropped in February – so much so that the Trump administration discontinued publishing daily numbers. The 724 ICE arrests per day during the first 8 days of February were in fact below – down 4.7 percent – from the average daily number of 759 arrests during all of FY 2024 under the Biden administration. Thus, despite assigning personnel from other agencies to immigration enforcement, the Trump administration did not meet the arrest numbers that had prevailed under President Biden during the last full year of his presidency. See Table 1.

ICE Removals Down by More than 6 Percent

ICE removals are also tracked in this congressionally mandated series. These are not reported for each month but on a cumulative fiscal year basis. Still, it is possible to derive some comparisons of daily removals for the Biden presidency during FY 2024 and removals under Trump for a 14-day period. Again, these figures show removals declined under Trump by 6.5 percent.

During all of FY 2024 the reports indicate that ICE deported 271,484 immigrants, or an average each day of 742 individuals. For the period after Trump assumed office, January 26, 2025 through February 8, 2025, ICE deported a total of 9,705 individuals or an average of 693 per day for the 14-day period. Despite enlisting the help of the military, rather than increasing removals, deportations actually declined. See Table 2.

Conclusion

We caution that these records that document arrests and removals during the initial days of the Trump presidency do not necessarily foretell future patterns. But they do show that thus far the hype does not in fact reflect what has occurred to date.