ICE struggles to boost arrest numbers despite infusion of resources

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has launched an all-of-government immigration crackdown with the urgency of a wartime effort, a mobilization comparable in scope to the responses to the 9/11 attacks and the coronavirus pandemic.

But despite the rapid infusion of resources, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to arrest higher numbers of immigrants and falling far short of the administration’s goals.

The president wants federal agents from across the government—even the Internal Revenue Service—looking for potential deportees, and the FBI says “thousands” of its employees are now supporting immigration operations. Trump has sent hundreds of troops to the southern border and military transport planes loaded with immigrants to as far away as India. The Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, where U.S. forces once sent enemy combatants seized on the battlefield, is now a destination for immigrant detainees, many picked up at the Mexican border.

ICE officers stormed out of the gates during the first 10 days of the administration. The agency did highly publicized enforcement raids in “sanctuary” cities run by Democrats, bringing along television crews and celebrities like Dr. Phil. For several days, ICE published its daily arrest numbers on social media, which started in the several hundreds per day and reached 1,179 on Jan. 26.

ICE arrests have sagged so far this month, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security, declining from about 800 per day in late January after Trump took office to fewer than 600 during the first 13 days of February. The administration has stopped publishing daily numbers, and Trump officials said they will release the data on a monthly basis to conserve resources. It is a level well below the Trump administration’s goal of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day.

“I’m not happy. We need more‚” Tom Homan, Trump’s designated “border czar,” said Thursday on Newsmax. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The top two enforcement officials at ICE were removed from their jobs this week and reassigned due to what Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said was a lack of “results.”

But critics see something else.

“I see a lot of show,” said Jason Houser, who was chief of staff for ICE during the Biden administration. “This administration wants to continuously bring in every piece of the government away from their mission.” He added that federal law enforcement officials who usually focus on illicit firearms, drugs and sex traffickers are now “standing around in their jackets arresting noncriminals.”

A major hindrance to Trump’s mass deportation goals has been ICE’s limited resources and staffing. Republican lawmakers say they want to infuse the agency with billions in additional funding to hire more officers, expand detention centers and deliver on the president’s pledge to deport “millions” of people.

ICE spent weeks leading up to Inauguration Day preparing target lists of people they could arrest during the opening salvo of Trump’s promised crackdown. Those target lists have been depleted, and with so many officers working six or even seven days a week, the agency has had little time to do the research, surveillance and planning required to rebuild them and coordinate arrests, according to current and former ICE officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the strains.

Officers told to work extra shifts and postpone vacations have been assured they will be compensated, two current ICE officials said, but agency veterans say it’s unrealistic to expect arrests and deportations to keep rising without more money and personnel.

Trump has enlisted officers and agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. marshals, the FBI and other agencies to help. ICE officials say the assistance is welcome but there is only so much other agencies can do if they aren’t trained in the processing, paperwork and case management elements of immigration enforcement.

Some White House aides sought to shift attention this week away from deportations by touting the president’s military campaign along the U.S.-Mexico border instead. Asked to comment for this article, White House spokesman Kush Desai declared in a statement that “President Trump has already delivered on the resounding mandate that the American people gave him in November to put an end to the Biden administration’s malfeasant handling of our southern border.”

Yet Trump’s “national emergency” declaration is broader than the border—citing the arrival of millions of immigrants who entered the United States illegally under his predecessor.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said Tuesday that Homan was “begging” for additional funds when he met with lawmakers this week. Graham’s committee adopted a budget blueprint for legislation to boost border security and immigration enforcement by $175 billion.

“We’re running out of money,” Graham told reporters.

Such an amount would have been unthinkable during Trump’s first term, when lawmakers hit an impasse over $5 billion for border wall funding and the government shut down for 35 days. The annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security is about $60 billion, including roughly $9 billion for ICE.

A Senate Republican aide said the money is intended for three buckets: personnel, facilities and infrastructure, and support for state and local officials. The money is expected to go toward pay raises, hiring and retention bonuses for ICE agents; immigration judges and support staff; assistant U.S. attorneys; the border wall; additional detention space and local and state law enforcement agencies to support ICE, the aide said.

Trump aides have been angered to learn that some ICE detainees arrested since the president took office were released from custody rather than deported. Releases are a standard and routine practice at ICE, which manages a docket of more than 8 million immigration cases. In some instances, detainees are released because they have pending immigration claims and court hearings, or due to medical reasons or a lack of bed space in ICE facilities.

A new order to ICE officials puts limits on releases without prior approval from the agency’s acting director Caleb Vitello, according to two people with knowledge of the new policy.

Homan has long tried to tamp down expectations for the kind of nationwide mass arrest operation that would allow the agency to deport “millions” of people. He said ICE would target criminals, gang members and “the worst of the worst”—emphasizing quality over quantity.

But Trump and other top aides are pushing for bigger numbers. Trump also promised millions of deportations during his first term but topped out at about 267,000 during the 2019 fiscal year. ICE would have to deport more than 2,700 people every day to reach 1 million annually, and the agency has never tallied half that amount in a single year.

When Trump called on his top aide Stephen Miller to list the administration’s accomplishments this week, Miller emphasized the steep decline in illegal border crossings, not deportations.

Illegal entries fell during most of 2024 as the Biden administration curbed access to the asylum system. Under Trump, they have plunged even lower.

But the drop in illegal crossings has left ICE with fewer easy-to-deport immigrants. That puts more pressure on ICE officers to go out into U.S. cities and communities to make arrests.

Homan has said he wants to take a phased approach to “widening the aperture” beyond immigrants with criminal records.

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said that the Trump administration is justifying its mobilization on the basis of “an invasion that doesn’t exist.”

“They’re almost creating the atmosphere: ‘Look we’re doing everything we can as if the country is not at war but the country is under attack’ … but there’s no invasion,” Chishti said. “We have never seen an administration, even the first Trump administration, so obsessed with immigration as the be all and end all of the government’s agenda.”

In interviews, immigration experts said the Defense Department’s level of involvement was most notable, especially the use of Guantánamo Bay to hold people removed from the interior of the United States.

“They’re pulling out all the stops, they’re looking into the nooks and crannies of the law to figure out what they can pull from, including sections that haven’t been used in decades at least,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, who worked at DHS under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Kieran Donahue, the president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, recently hosted an event in Washington with Homan that drew more than 250 sheriffs from around the country, the highest turnout Donahue said he’s seen for the event in 20 years.

Sheriffs are crucial to Homan and Trump’s wider plans because ICE has a program that can deputize them to make immigration arrests and hold violators in their jails.

The problem, Donahue said, is that most counties can’t afford to send deputies away for weeks of training, and their jails are already full with criminal violators or even inmates who can’t be housed in state prisons because they’re also at capacity. States and counties don’t have the ability to build new jails overnight, nor release criminals to make room for immigrant detainees, even if new federal dollars start flowing.

“I think the willingness and the effort is there,” Donahue said. “Sheriffs are standing ready. But there are some others that need to get in on the act, too, and that’s the state legislators. That’s the state governors, because that money needs to be appropriated to clear up space in our jails.”

Donahue said he expected some sheriffs—many of whom are elected officials—will come under more political pressure if Trump’s deportations expand beyond criminals and begin significantly disrupting daily life and commerce. It shouldn’t fall to local sheriffs to fix the U.S. immigration system, he said. “I hope Congress is listening before that happens,” Donahue said.