Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported over 142,000 people in 2023 – less than 5% of all 3.2 million migrants encountered at US borders.
In its 2023 annual report released last week, ICE readily noted its number of expulsions was double those of the previous year, but under Joe Biden’s presidency the agency is deporting far fewer people than it did under Donald Trump.
For example, in the immigration agency’s 2018 financial year, ICE removed 265,000 individuals from the US, representing over 30% of the 680,000 migrants encountered at the border that year, according to Customs and Border Protection’s figures.
During the fist year Biden was in office, statistics from CBP show border encounters almost tripled from 647,000 to 1.95 million.
That same year Biden issued new guidelines about how ICE should carry out immigration enforcement, which resulted in just 59,000 removals for the year, the lowest number of deportations in the last six years.
ICE’s latest figures show its agents deported 142,580 immigrants to about 180 countries from the US in the last fiscal year, including more than 44,000 from the interior and more than 98,000 from the border, the report said.
It also highlighted how ICE removed more noncitizens in 2023 than in 2022, when 72,000 people were deported by the agency.
“Among those removed, 108 were foreign fugitives wanted by their governments for crimes including homicide, rape, kidnapping, drug trafficking, assault, and sex offenses,” the report stated.
According to ICE, 139 “known or suspected terrorists” and 3,406 “known or suspected gang members” were also among the deportees.
Additionally, more than 60,000 noncitizens were expelled prior to May 12 last year under the Title 42 public health order.
“ICE continues to disrupt transnational criminal organizations, remove threats to national security and public safety, uphold the integrity of US immigration laws, and collaborate with colleagues across government and law enforcement in pursuit of our mission to keep US communities safe,” ICE Deputy Director Patrick J. Lechleitner said in a statement.
ICE is not the only branch of the Department of Homeland Security which deports people, and many who are initally stopped by border patrol are ejected from the country or sent back to their point of origin by CBP.
Full figures for the number of people deported from the US were not immediately available, but between October and May, the DHS said it had deported over 300,000 people, a number which included those sent by ICE.
As well as deporting people, ICE also monitors migrants who are in the US pursuing asylum applications or on parole.
The 2023 report showed the true scale of that operation, revealing at the end of the year the agency had 37,000 in custody waiting to be removed from the US, and that another 6.2 million people who were non-detained.
That figure has almost doubled since 2020 when ICE were looking after 3.3m active cases in total.
During CBP’s fiscal 2023, which runs from Ocotber 1 to Septemeber 30, more than 3,201,000 encounters with migrants were reported along the US-Mexico border, according to data from US Customs and Border Protection.
Nearly 2.5 million people were apprehended illegally crossing the Mexico-US border in that year — a record-breaking tally — but the Department of Homeland Securty also estimates another 670,000 “gotaways” managed to evaded authorities and get across the border unchecked.
The border crisis also shows no sign of slowing down with more than 276,000 asylum seekers hoping to cross from Mexico in December, the highest number for a single month in history, according to the preliminary data obtained by Fox News.
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