The Trump administration’s real enforcement action record is still being hidden. When the number of ICE arrests started to decline, the practice of posting the daily arrest totals on social media was discontinued. Regarding Trump’s campaign pledge to remove immigrants in large numbers, it doesn’t seem like any daily statistics of the number of removals this administration has actually carried out have ever been made public.
Based on an analysis of data that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been quietly publishing semi-monthly for several years, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released a report in February 2025.
ICE has now released two new reports every six months. A full month after our previous report, its most recent report, which was released on March 14, included data as of March 8, 2025. Here, we examine these newly released figures to evaluate how the current administration’s arrest and removal record stacks up against former President Biden’s final full year in office.
More Arrests, Less Releases
Trump’s first month in office saw 20,000 arrests, roughly equivalent to February 2025, according to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which are in charge of capturing undocumented immigrants in the nation’s interior. Based on ICE detainees at the end of February, some estimates also place this number as high as 23,000; however, the new administration has also been seen to be releasing fewer individuals from immigration detention, which may be contributing to this increase.
Compared to 2024, when ICE arrested fewer than 10,000 people per month under the Biden administration, 20,000 ICE arrests in a month represents a roughly 100 percent increase. Because it compared all ICE arrests under Trump to at-large arrests under Biden, which are a smaller subset of agency arrests, the Department of Homeland Security’s assertion that arrests increased by more than 600 percent was found to be misleading. But in late 2022 and early 2023, when illegal border crossings from Mexico into the United States were once again on the rise, ICE under the Biden administration had arrested up to 16,000 people a month.
Following the reassignment of the agency’s acting director on February 21, ICE announced new leadership on Sunday. The White House is reportedly unhappy with the agency’s progress on Trump’s widely reported mass deportation plan. Media reports claim that actual deportations under Trump have not kept pace with average monthly numbers under Biden in 2024. The numbers are not entirely comparable, though, because Trump has once again prohibited a large number of immigrants from entering the country and from appearing before immigration courts, which has limited the number of people who have been removed from the country through this method.
Although the administration has made a number of adjustments to potentially increase arrests and deportations in the upcoming months, it appears that achieving the target of one million deportations in a single year will be difficult.
Alleged Limited Detention
ICE uses logistics and practicality to support its transfer decisions. Regarding the additional reasons mentioned in Khan Suri’s complaint, an agency spokesperson remained silent.
On its website, the agency states that it employs “limited detention resources to detain aliens to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States” and that detention is “non-punitive.”
