A True Comparison of ICE Arrests Under Trump II and Biden

 by Andrew R. Arthur

On February 12, I dissected CBS News’s claim that “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records”. Here’s a deeper dive into the statistics so you can judge for yourself whether ICE under Trump II is breaking some sort of historical immigration-enforcement norm, but if I told you just 9.3 percent of all the agency’s street arrests involved aliens with any criminal history whatsoever, would you guess that happened under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in FY 2022? Probably not.

The Key Metrics

As I’ve explained in the past, two key metrics define DHS’s effectiveness in reducing the population of aliens unlawfully present in the United States: ICE arrests of removable aliens in the United States (“interior arrests”); and its deportations of aliens living in the United States (as opposed to entering at the border), also known as “interior removals”.

Why are those two metrics “key”? Because immigration enforcement at the border is reactive, driven by the efforts of foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally.

Administrations have tools to dissuade such entries, to be sure, and Trump II under CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott has used them to a fuller effect than any of its predecessors.

That said, if foreign nationals are going to come illegally — and smugglers are going to bring them — CBP’s only option is how it will respond to them. If no foreign nationals sought to enter the United States at the U.S.-Mexico line, Border Patrol apprehensions would be zero. If 2.2 million-plus come (as happened under Biden in FY 2022), Southwest border apprehensions will climb accordingly.

Consequently, border apprehensions are easy to quantify but a poor measure for gauging immigration enforcement.

Immigration enforcement in the interior, on the other hand, is proactive — it represents the efforts of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate under whatever administration is in control to arrest and remove aliens.

Interior enforcement begins when ICE identifies a target for removal and performs an interior arrest of that alien. Assuming the agency obtains a final removal order for that targeted alien (plus any aliens identified and taken into custody in “collateral” arrests), the deportation of that alien constitutes an “interior removal”.

CBS News’s Focus

The focus of the CBS News analysis was on ICE interior arrests between January 21, 2025, and January 31, 2026. That’s 10 days more than a full year, but there’s no indication the agency did anything different in that extended period that it hadn’t been doing previously.

Here’s the key excerpt from the outlet’s reporting: “The percentage of ICE arrests of those with criminal histories ... went down, from 72% in fiscal year 2024, to nearly 60% in Mr. Trump's first year.”

Official statistics from FY 2025 have not been published yet, so I will take CBS News’s Trump II claim at face value, and here is what ICE reported in its Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report:

In FY 2024, ERO arrested 113,431 noncitizens — a 33.5% decrease from FY 2023, when ERO conducted a total of 170,590 arrests.

...

In FY 2024, 81,312, or 71.7%, of the 113,431 noncitizens ERO arrested were convicted criminals or had pending criminal charges at the time of arrest.

Plainly, 71.7 percent rounded up is 72 percent, so that part checks out.

But here’s the very next line from that ICE report (with emphasis), which CBS News failed to cite: “In contrast, 73,822, or 43%, of the 170,590 [aliens] ERO arrested in FY 2023 had criminal histories, representing a significant jump in the percentage of criminals arrested” in FY 2024, the year the outlet relied on for its purported baseline.

In other words, assuming CBS News is accurate in stating that 60 percent of ICE’s interior arrests under Trump II involved aliens with criminal arrests or convictions, it is a higher concentration of criminals — 17 percent more — than under Biden in FY 2023.

Perhaps FY 2023 was an outlier, and maybe earlier ICE arrests under Biden focused more closely on criminal aliens?

Not really. Here’s how the ICE ERO described its efforts in its FY 2023 Annual Report: “Of the total arrests conducted by ICE in FY 2023, 43.3% of those arrested had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, up from 32.5% in FY 2022.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, and again assuming CBS News’s depiction of Trump II interior enforcement is accurate, 60 percent of ICE arrests under Trump II involved criminal aliens, compared to 43.3 percent in FY 2023 and 32.5 percent in FY 2022.

In real terms, that’s a 38.5 percent increase (from 43.3 to 60) in criminal-history arrests in the past year-plus compared to FY 2023 and an 85-percent jump (from 32.5 to 60) when compared to FY 2022 — both under Biden.

“At-Large Arrests”

One big flaw in the CBS News analysis is its failure to distinguish total ICE interior arrests from “at-large arrests” of aliens. Let me explain.

Most arrests for criminal violations occur at the state and local — not federal — level and ICE (and “Border Czar” Tom Homan) would prefer to take custody of those criminal aliens directly from the jails and prisons where they are locked-up, detained, or incarcerated.

That’s because jails and prisons are “secure” areas where criminal aliens have been screened to ensure they don’t possess weapons, and where local cops and sheriffs are around to offer backup in case the alien resists.

Two markers of a “sanctuary” state, city, or locality, however, are: (1) it refuses to allow ICE officers into its jails and prisons; and (2) it won’t honor ICE detainers to hold criminal aliens for immigration officers to pick up.

Those are huge statutory impediments to immigration enforcement because section 236(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires ERO officers to arrest designated criminal aliens as soon as “the alien is released” from criminal custody “without regard to whether the alien is released on parole, supervised release, or probation, and without regard to whether the alien may be arrested or imprisoned again for the same offense”.

If ICE ERO officers are barred under sanctuary laws from taking custody of those criminals “when they are released” from state prisons or local jails, they must go into the communities in which the aliens live and work to find them and then perform an “at-large” immigration arrest.

Fortunately, many if not most states and localities aren’t sanctuaries, so ICE under either Biden or Trump II could comply with that section 236(c) mandate by arresting their detained aliens in criminal custody.

The reason why more ICE interior arrests under Biden in FY 2022 and FY 2023 didn’t involve aliens with criminal arrests and convictions is because then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deliberately limited the number of criminal aliens he allowed ERO officers to pursue.

That’s not supposition or conjecture: The states of Texas and Louisiana sued Mayorkas and the Biden administration because they refused to arrest criminal aliens in their custody on immigration grounds, in a case captioned Texas v. U.S.

Texas eventually made its way to the Supreme Court (sub nom. U.S. v. Texas), where the justices held that the states lacked standing to force DHS to pursue more arrests of aliens from state and local custody.

ICE ERO criminal arrests likely jumped in FY 2024 due to the bad political optics in an election year of restraining officers from arresting criminal aliens, particularly when news of high-profile crimes (such as the murders of Laken Riley, Jessica Nungaray, and Rachel Morin) committed by criminal aliens made it into the mainstream media.

The immigration enforcement actions critics have decried in Minnesota, Illinois, Los Angeles, and elsewhere are all at-large arrests, and yet CBS News failed to explain the differences between those arrests and jail arrests, which is odd because DHS statistics publish “at-large” arrests as a separate metric.

Because ICE has failed to publish an FY 2025 annual report that includes that statistic, and because CBS News never referred to it — let alone quantified it — under Trump II, the only numbers available are historical ones, but they are telling.

In FY 2017, the first partial year of the first Trump administration, 78 percent of the just over 40,000 ICE at-large arrests involved aliens with criminal convictions (66 percent) or pending charges (12 percent).

FY 2018, ICE made just over 40,500 at-large arrests, 57-plus percent of them involving aliens with criminal convictions and 15.8 percent of aliens with pending criminal charges, meaning 72.9 percent of the agency’s at-large arrests that year were of aliens with a “criminal history”.

For various reasons, there were “only” 36,366 ICE ERO at-large arrests in FY 2019, but 71.3 percent of those aliens had criminal histories — 55.5 percent convictions and 15.8 percent pending criminal charges.

Pandemic-related restrictions on immigration-detention space dampened ICE arrest efforts in the second half of FY 2020, and consequently ERO officers made just short of 24,000 at-large arrests that year.

Some 72.4 percent of those at-large arrests in FY 2020 involved aliens with criminal histories: 55.6 percent of them convictions and nearly 16.9 percent pending criminal charges.

In FY 2021, as pandemic restrictions eased in President Biden’s first partial fiscal year, ICE at-large arrests increased modestly to roughly 26,000, but just 29.4 percent involved aliens with criminal histories, and less than a quarter of those total arrests (24 percent) were of aliens with criminal convictions.

Then there was FY 2022: That year, ICE made more than 85,000 at-large arrests — twice the Trump I high-water mark — but 90.7 percent of those arrests (77,642) involved aliens who had no criminal convictions at all, only civil immigration charges.

ICE under Biden surpassed that at-large arrest total in FY 2023, a year in which officers arrested nearly 91,500 aliens in the community, but just 12,376 of them (13.5 precent) had either a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges.

The remainder, more than 79,000 arrests in total, involved “other immigration violators”, as DHS terms non-criminal removable aliens.

At-large arrests by immigration officers in the interior plummeted to fewer than 33,250 under Biden in FY 2024, likely because ICE ERO was finally responding to the pleas of states like Texas and Louisiana to round up criminal violators in their jails, but even then more than half — 55.3 percent — of those at-large arrests involved aliens without any criminal history.

Here’s how those ICE at-large arrests under Trump I and Biden look when graphed:

Double Standards

Unlike CBS News, none of the statistics cited above come from secret “internal DHS documents” — they are published on the web, for anyone who cares to look for them.

But I highlight ICE at-large arrests under Trump I and Biden because those operations are at the heart of nearly every critique of the agency’s activities under Trump II, which is the only reason CBS News reported on the issue to begin with.

There appears to be a double standard here.

I’ve looked, and can’t find a single instance where any mayor, governor, or member of Congress in 2022 complained that nearly “91 percent” of the aliens Mayorkas’s ICE officers were arresting on their streets were otherwise “law-abiding non-citizens”, or any major outlet touting the fact “less than 9.3 percent” of ICE at-large arrests involved criminals of any sort.

To be fair, if CBS News had subtracted the (unreported) number of criminal aliens ICE ERO arrested under Trump II at jails and prisons in places that aren’t “sanctuaries”, the total percentage of at-large interior arrests of aliens without criminal histories is likely much lower than the 60 percent figure it reported.

But if anything, that underscores why states and localities shouldn’t ignore ICE detainers and shouldn’t block ERO officers from taking custody of their criminals. If the agency had access to those criminals, at-large arrests would plummet, and officers would be too busy processing criminals to make street arrests.

ICE officers don’t want to make “at-large” alien arrests any more than local honchos want them in their communities, but if you make thinly veiled partisan attacks on the agency’s enforcement record under Trump II, tell the whole story — including about the 175,000-plus “non-criminal” aliens swept off U.S. streets by immigration officers under Biden.

https://cis.org/Arthur/True-Comparison-ICE-Arrests-Under-Trump-II-and-Biden