ICE holds record 65,000 migrants; arrests, deportations reach record pace

ICE is shattering records for immigration enforcement, setting new high-water marks for arrests, deportations and detention.

The agency reported holding more than 65,000 migrants as of Nov. 15, a record by far. It had fewer than 60,000 in late September, just before the government shutdown, and fewer than 40,000 in January when President Biden turned over power to President Trump.

Fueling the rise is a surge in arrests. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement averaged nearly 1,200 arrests daily since Oct. 1, a record pace.

ICE is deporting illegal immigrants at an even higher rate, more than 1,250 daily.

If that held for 12 months, it would exceed 450,000 for the entire year, surpassing the record set in 2012.

The number is still shy of the 1 million mark the administration has set.

“They need to ramp it up,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project. “There’s a big population that should be easier to remove, and we need to get to those and remove them. Americans are willing to support mass deportation, but it has to be mass deportation.”

The numbers were released as part of a periodic update of ICE detention data. Releases were suspended during the government shutdown, so this was the first data for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

From Oct. 1 to Nov. 15, the date the data was current, ICE reported that its personnel recorded 54,735 book-ins, which serves as a yardstick for overall arrests. Customs and Border Protection reported another 7,066 book-ins.

During the Biden administration, those numbers were reversed. CBP book-ins were dramatically higher than those of ICE.

The border chaos left ICE scrambling to deal with the migrants picked up by the Border Patrol and unable to focus on its arrests in the interior.

The vast majority of ICE activities were pickups of migrants from prisons and jails. Nearly 95% of ICE arrestees in detention in 2024 had either criminal convictions or pending charges.

That number has now dipped below 60%, fueling complaints that ICE is not focusing on the “criminal aliens” who Mr. Trump said were his priority.

Ms. Jenks said she wasn’t bothered by the decreased criminal ratio.

“I couldn’t care less how many of them have committed extra crimes. We need to deport all of them,” she said.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE has funding to hold up to 100,000 migrants on any given day under Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. She said the funding helps deportations.

“With innovative partnerships like Alligator Alcatraz, Speedway Slammer, Louisiana Lockup, and Cornhusker Clink, we’ve significantly expanded detention space. Despite a rapid number of injunctions, DHS is working rapidly to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination — home,” she said.

She also provided numbers that appear to differ from ICE’s published data.

Ms. McLaughlin said 70% of the illegal immigrants ICE has arrested have had criminal convictions or pending charges and that the administration is on pace for 600,000 deportations this year.

That 600,000 figure appears to include CBP border ousters, which are not part of ICE’s formal removal numbers.

It’s also still shy of the 1 million deportation mark.

When asked about that target, Homeland Security Department officials have cited “self-deportations” as a means of meeting that goal.

Ms. McLaughlin said the government estimates that 1.6 million illegal immigrants have returned to their home countries without formal removal.

Officials have been cagey about the source for that figure. Ms. Jenks said she is not sold without hard data.

“We need those numbers. If they’re not releasing them, then the assumption, logically, is they’re not good enough,” she said.

She said a major selling point of Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer was an infusion of tens of billions of dollars to ICE to carry out mass deportations.

“We need to see a million removals a year,” she said. “I get they have to ramp up to that. I have been defending them on giving them a minute to ramp it up. But they have to ramp it up.”

The deportation push has fierce critics among immigrant rights groups and has sparked a strident resistance in some communities, where arrests are labeled “kidnappings.”

Still, polling shows the public largely backs deportations.

A Harvard CAPS-Harris survey this month found that 54% of respondents supported the deportations of “all immigrants who are here illegally.” When asked specifically about those who “have committed crimes,” 79% of respondents supported deportation.