A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 271,484 immigrants last fiscal year, marking the highest level of deportations since 2014, according to a newly released annual report.
President-elect Donald Trump plans to make mass deportation a cornerstone of his incoming administration, rebuking President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy.
But the latest ICE data reveals that the Biden administration carried out a significant number of removals last fiscal year, exceeding the previous two years of Biden’s presidency, and largely focused on public safety and national security threats.
Many of the deportations were of people who crossed the US-Mexico border illegally, reflecting the challenge Biden administration officials grappled with along the southern border amid record migration across the globe. ICE removed people to nearly 200 different countries, the report shows. It covers October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024.
“Throughout the year, the agency was called on to do more without commensurate funding, working within the confines of strained resources and competing priorities while steadfastly supporting the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies in their efforts to secure the border,” acting ICE Director Patrick Lechleitner said in the report.
As Trump aides tout plans to detain and deport undocumented immigrants at large scale, they are also bracing to face what Biden and his predecessors grappled with in one of the key immigration agencies: limited resources and personnel.
Tom Homan, who Trump has tapped as his incoming administration’s “border czar,” said Wednesday that he’ll need funding from Congress to bolster the agency’s resources and fulfill the president-elect’s deportation promise.
In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Homan said he would need a minimum of 100,000 beds to detain undocumented immigrants – more than doubling the 40,000 detention beds ICE is currently funded for – and require more ICE agents. The agency has around 6,000 immigration enforcement officers.
“We want to arrest as many people as we can that are in the country illegally,” Homan said on “The Source” Wednesday.
Under Biden, ICE rolled out guidelines that would curtail enforcement measures to focus more narrowly on immigrants who pose a national security, border security or public safety risk. Homan has also said he plans to carry out targeted operations focused on public safety and national security threats but left the door open to picking up other undocumented immigrants who may be encountered.
ICE’s latest report reveals that of the 271,484 removals carried out last fiscal year, around 32% of those were people with criminal histories. ICE’s enforcement and removal branch also arrested 113,431 immigrants, down from the previous year. Of those, 81,312 were convicted criminals or had pending criminal charges at the time of arrest.
There are around 1.4 million people in the US with final orders of removal. But many of them can’t be sent back to their home countries because they won’t take them or there’s still some sort of potential relief available to them through the immigration system.
The agency managed more than 7.6 million immigrants in removal proceedings or subject to final orders of removal on what’s known as the non-detained docket, according to ICE’s report, meaning they are not currently in ICE custody and are still going through the immigration process.
Former President Barack Obama deported around 400,000 in one year, but a large number of those were recent border crossers. Trump faces a steeper challenge in targeting those already in the country.
“There’s a difference between arresting people and deporting people. We’ve been focused on ICE’s ability to arrest people, but unless they make a significant change in the immigration process, the act to get somebody deported does require some form of process,” a former Homeland Security official previously told CNN.
Other factors that drove the higher number of removals under Biden included country negotiations to ratchet up the number of accepted removal flights, as well as diplomatic efforts with countries in the eastern hemisphere like China.
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