Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 602,000 illegal immigrants in the year and a half since President Donald Trump took office and unleashed a mass deportation operation, according to federal data shared with the Washington Examiner.
The 18-month figure, even when cut by one-third, blows past any one-year record high seen during previous administrations. The 602,000 arrests are also higher than the four-year total arrests seen during Trump’s first term or during former President Joe Biden‘s tenure.
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However, several ICE officers and immigration experts told the Washington Examiner they have questions about the precise number of ICE arrests given the variety of numbers that the Trump administration has touted, often different by hundreds of thousands.
What the numbers show
The previous record high for annual arrests was set during the eight-year Obama administration. ICE arrested 311,000 people in fiscal 2011. More than 1.2 million people were arrested from 2009 to 2012, as well as an additional 641,000 in former President Barack Obama’s second term, historical ICE reports show.
During Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021, ICE arrested 548,000 illegal immigrants. Approximately 500,000 ICE arrests occurred across all four years of the Biden administration.
Immediately after Trump took office in January 2025, ICE began making arrests. Under Biden, ICE was only allowed to arrest a small portion of the total illegal immigrant population. Trump rescinded those priorities for arrest, and arrests quickly rose to between 500 and 1,000 per day.
As of April, ICE was reaching nearly 1,000 arrests every day — well over double the average seen over the past decade.
Adam Isacson, director for oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said “something dramatically changed” this spring when former Sen. Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security from ousted Secretary Kristi Noem.
Arrests quietly ramped up to an average of 1,400 per day, although White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller’s demands for 2,000 a day continued to go unmet.
Arrests nearly double
In mid-April, then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified in the House that ICE had arrested nearly 457,000 people since Trump took office.
DHS then told the Washington Examiner in a statement that it had surpassed 900,000 arrests as of May 17 — meaning if the DHS number is accurate, it had arrested nearly as many people in the preceding 16 months as it did between April and mid-May.
“As of May 17, we have now deported nearly 900,000 illegal aliens and arrested over 900,000 illegal aliens,” the DHS spokesperson wrote.
The Washington Examiner reached out to DHS several times for clarification about the sudden near-doubling of arrests from April to May this year. DHS responded this week with numbers that showed ICE had arrested 602,000 illegal immigrants under Trump and another DHS agency, Customs and Border Protection, had arrested 447,000.
Together, both numbers come to nearly 1.05 million, which would put it on par with the 900,000 figure reported by the department in May.
However, DHS did not respond to a request for further clarification as to whether the 447,000 CBP arrests were at the nation’s borders, inside the United States, or at both locations.
ICE arrests remain unclear
Newly released data on ICE’s website show that just over 505,000 arrests were made by the agency under Trump, adding further confusion to DHS’s 602,000 and 900,000 figures.
Isacson said if as many people were being arrested and detained nationwide as the higher estimates by the DHS claim, overcrowding at detention centers would be a major issue, and immigration lawyers who visit clients in those centers would speak out about it.
“Imagine what the detention centers would look like. You know, they’d be, like, five times capacity,” Isacson said. “There would be some horror stories.”
An ICE employee who gathers statistics on arrests regularly for DHS and the White House said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that ICE’s arrests were being double-counted because the agency’s separate investigative arm was reporting its own arrests to DHS, as well as counting them into ICE’s numbers.
“HSI is separately submitting its own numbers as well,” the ICE officer said in a phone call. “HSI is giving us their arrest numbers. We are mixing it. We’re adding it to ICE [Enforcement and Removal Operations’s] numbers. Then we’re reporting these arrest numbers to [headquarters] as ERO arrests. We’ve been doing that for over a year.”
DHS and ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the double-counting of arrests.
ICE MELTING UNDER TRUMP’S EXPECTATIONS, OFFICERS SAY
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, called for the Trump administration to disclose all numbers clearly.
“We need to see the numbers. It’s important for the taxpayers to see what they’re actually paying for,” Arthur said in a phone call.
