DHS: Biden’s DHS was ‘cooking the books’ to pump up ICE arrests

Homeland Security Department officials accused the Biden administration Wednesday of “cooking the books” to falsely pump up immigration arrest numbers by counting illegal immigrants who were caught and released rather than detained and deported.

A senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said more than two-thirds of the arrests ICE tallied last year were “enforcement theater” and that the illegal immigrants were quickly back on the streets.

“We found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into American communities,” said Todd Lyons, the new acting director at ICE. “The previous administration counted these arrests even though no immigration enforcement action was taken.”

He said that once the numbers are compared more fairly, ICE’s arrests under President Trump will look much better.

ICE officials recorded 32,809 interior arrests over the nearly 50 days from Jan. 20 to March 10. ICE said that was close to the total for all of 2024 once the “pass-through” arrests were discounted.

Among those were 1,155 known or suspected gang members and 39 known or suspected terrorists, almost three times the rate of the Biden administration, ICE said.

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A senior ICE official said the directive to count the pass-through arrests came from the Biden administration’s Homeland Security Department, which oversees the agency.

The official said the point seemed to be to benefit the illegal immigrants. Once they had an ICE arrest, they could use it to show local governments they were in some legal process, which often qualified them for services.

“This gave them a pathway to establishing a long-term … residency here in the U.S.,” the official said. “These pass-through arrests, while they looked great, it really hindered our officers. We weren’t out there looking for the worst of the worst.”

Officials briefed reporters on the allegations as they sought to rewrite the narrative on ICE’s efforts early in the Trump administration.

News reports have said Mr. Trump is displeased with the rates of arrests and deportations, which fall short of the “mass deportations” he promised during his campaign.

According to ICE data, the agency deported about 645 people daily in the last weeks of February, down 17% from the same period in 2024.

That drop in deportations is explained mainly by the drop in new illegal immigrants arriving at the border. ICE handles arrests in the country’s interior and serves as the main deportation agency for interior and border cases.

Indeed, the number of border book-ins to ICE dropped from 628 a day in February 2024 to 163 daily last month.

ICE’s book-ins, a measure of its interior arrests, more than doubled from 234 a day under President Biden to 632 a day under Mr. Trump.

The result is that ICE is holding 47,600 migrants in detention, officials said.

“We are maxed out,” the senior agency official told reporters.

Even as ICE works to gear up, Customs and Border Protection, which polices the nation’s boundaries and mans its entry points, reported record-breaking success Wednesday.

CBP said it detected 11,709 unauthorized migrants entering from Mexico in February, down from more than 60,000 in January and from the Biden peak of more than 300,000 in December 2023.

The gains were reported across all areas.

Agents recorded fewer than 800 unaccompanied alien children for just the second time ever and for the first non-pandemic month.

Migrants traveling as families dropped from more than 7,000 to about 800.

“This victory at our borders makes the past four years even more of a tragedy,” Rep. Mark Green, Tennessee Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said after the numbers were released Wednesday.

He said Laken Riley and Kayla Hamilton, killed by illegal immigrants who were caught and released during the Biden administration, “paid the price with their lives.”