As much as Drumphf and Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem like to play dress up and have ICE agents perform lots of pageantry of arrests and military flights to Gitmo — the truth is that their actual number of deportations in the last few weeks have only been a fraction of what the Biden Administration had been performing.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. focused enforcement on the record numbers of people who had recently crossed the southern border and used expanded emergency powers under Covid to conduct four million deportations during his tenure. Mr. Trump conducted 1.9 million during his first term.
Rate of Deportations
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and Mr. Trump used powers unlocked by the Covid health emergency, known as Title 42, to immediately expel border crossers from the country. Mr. Biden continued the practice until the end of the public health emergency in May 2023.
Title 42 expulsions made up a vast majority of removals during the pandemic years, but their totals can be misleading. Because these expulsions carried fewer penalties than a formal removal order, many people who were expelled simply attempted to cross again. (Those who were caught could be expelled repeatedly — the proportion of people who were arrested by Border Patrol again within a year rose to nearly 30 percent in 2021.)
Because of Covid and TItle 42, Biden’s actual deportation rate was several times that of Trump and Obama. As shown in the chart even after Title 42 was eventually ended, the deportation rate was still higher than either previous administration.
And so far, the Drumphf Administration remains at only half the rate of Biden’s last full year, which was considerably less than the previous 3 years.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Tuesday that in the first two weeks of President Donald Trump's second term, nearly 5,700 illegal immigrants had been deported.
If the new administration continues at that clip, one expert told Newsweek, then it would be on track to deport half the number of migrants removed during former President Joe Biden's last full fiscal year in 2024.
[...]
According to DHS, 5,693 people were deported or removed to 121 countries in the two weeks between Inauguration Day until February 3, 2025. The last monthly figures available from Biden's presidency, for November 2024, show 48,970 total removals, averaging around 12,200 a week.
Yes, that’s right — as much of a show that they’re making this process — they’re only deporting about half the number of people Biden did without any fanfare.
Apparently, this has Drumphf a little pissed off.
President Donald Trump is furious that his administration isn't deporting as many immigrants as he had promised his voters it would — and his border czar Tom Homan is feeling the heat of his wrath, NBC News reported on Friday evening.
Homan, who previously served as Trump's acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has become notorious for making the rounds on TV to vow harsh and decisive action on immigration and the border. He stirred controversy by suggesting whole families could be deported even if the children were U.S. citizens, and threatened Democratic mayors with arrest if they stood in the way of ICE agents carrying out Trump's plans.
But Trump is nonetheless unsatisfied with his work output, per the report.
"A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting 'angry' that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to 'border czar' Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello," reported Kristen Welker and Julia Ainsley.
One source told NBC, “It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people.”
Aw, poor baby.
He’s gotten so frustrated he’s started firing the leaders of ICE.
Disappointment within the Trump administration over the speed of immigration arrests has cost two immigration enforcement officials their top Washington jobs, according to media reports.
The staff shakeup at Immigration and Customs Enforcement came Tuesday evening when employees received notice that Russell Hott and Peter Berg had been reassigned, a Department of Homeland Security official told ABC News. The two senior agency officials were responsible for identifying and removing immigrants in the country illegally.
It comes as the department said in a statement that ICE “needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of for the past four years.”
“We have a President, DHS Secretary, and American people who rightfully demand results, and our ICE leadership will ensure the agency delivers,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told ABC News in an emailed statement.
It is rather amazing that ICE can’t seem to work as efficiently now in February as they were in… November. I wonder what the problem could be? Maybe it’s because they seem to be looking more for photo-ops with migrants being perp-walked and flown around on super expensive Military Jets than actually doing — what’s the word — “Law Enforcement?”
And I mean, what with Kristi Noem spending her time playing “Dress up.”
Oh, by the way, they also are deporting a lower percentage of criminals than the Biden Administration did. In fact, many of those arrested by Drumphf’s ICE were pending asylum and deportations and hadn’t committed any crime at all.
Since Trump took office, the social media page of ICE on X has been posting photos of migrants arrested along with their alleged crimes: driving under the influence, possession of child pornography, assault, robbery.
The day Carlos was arrested, about 1,100 people were arrested by ICE across the country, the agency reported on social media.
NBC News reported, however, that 48 percent of the people arrested didn't have a criminal record.
ICE didn't respond to multiple requests for a breakdown of who's been arrested and for what crimes.
In a press briefing last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked how many people arrested had a criminal record. She said, "All of them, because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and, therefore, they are criminals, as far as this administration goes."
But Carlos came to the U.S. through a legal pathway, although the CBP One app he used was shut down by Trump as soon as he took office.
Carlos is currently detained at an ICE detention facility in Taylor, Texas. His parents say he has not been charged with any crime. It's unclear whether he'll eventually be deported to Venezuela - or released.
Raha Walla, the vice president for strategy and campaign at the National Immigration Law Center, called Trump's actions "deeply cruel," particular to innocent immigrants.
"This administration has taken every potential authority it has to detain and deport immigrants," Wala said. "It's increasingly challenging for innocent individuals to be able to get out of detention if they are even accused of committing a crime and it's just deeply unfortunate."
“48 Percent had no criminal record.” Compare that to Biden who not only removed more people, a higher percentage of them were criminals.
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.
81,312 out of 113,431 is 71% criminal. That’s a little better than 52% from Drumphf so far.
And some of those innocent people — one who entered after an appointment via the CBPOne app — have been sent to GITMO.
Records indicate that not all these people sent to GITMO are “Criminals.”
Since Feb. 4, the Trump administration has flown about 100 immigrant detainees to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a facility better known for having held those suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Officials have widely touted the flights as a demonstration of President Donald Trump’s commitment to one of the central promises of his campaign, and they’ve distributed photos of some of the immigrants at both takeoff and landing. But they have not released the names of those they’re holding or provided details about their alleged crimes.
In recent days, however, information about the flights and the people on them has emerged that calls the government’s narrative into question. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified nearly a dozen Venezuelan immigrants who have been transferred to Guantanamo. The New York Times published a larger list with some, but not all, of the same names.
For three of the Guantanamo detainees who had been held at an immigration detention center in El Paso, ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records about their criminal histories and spoke to their families. The three men are all Venezuelan. Each had been detained by immigration authorities soon after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and was being held in custody, awaiting deportation. In some cases, they had been languishing for months because Venezuela, until recently, was largely not accepting deportees. According to U.S. federal court records, two of them had no crimes on their records except for illegal entry. The third had picked up an additional charge while in detention, for kicking an officer while being restrained during a riot.
Relatives of the three men said in interviews on Tuesday that they have been left entirely in the dark about their loved ones. They all said that their relatives were not criminals, and two provided records from the Venezuelan Interior Ministry and other documents to support their statements. They said the U.S. government has given them neither information about the detainees’ whereabouts nor the ability to speak with them.
Attorneys say they have also been denied access. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, arguing that the U.S. Constitution gives the detainees rights to legal representation that shouldn’t be stripped away just because they have been moved to Guantanamo.
“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantanamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case. “It is difficult to think of anything so flagrantly at odds with the fundamental principles on which our country was built.”
These are the ”worst of the worst?”
Drumphf is just making a big show with ICE Agents in body armor doing perp walks, migrants being flown on military cargo planes and marched into GITMO — but he’s not really getting the job done or protecting the public nearly as well as Biden was doing without bragging about it — which he could have.
Maybe it’s stupidity or just plain incompetence but it’s not going to get any better from here on out.
