TRAC

Published Mar 25, 2025

The Trump administration continues to conceal its actual record of enforcement actions. While initially daily numbers of ICE arrests were posted on social media, this practice stopped when arrest numbers began to fall.[1] As to Trump’s promised campaign of the mass removal of immigrants, to date no daily figures appear to have ever been released of the actual number of removals carried out by this administration.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) published a report a month ago based on its analysis of figures that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been publishing semi-monthly without fanfare for a number of years. ICE was and is currently required to publish these figures under provisions of the annual Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Acts Congress has passed. At the time of TRAC’s last report, the latest semi-monthly report published on February 14 contained figures current as of February 8, 2025. TRAC’s last report therefore tracked only the initial days of the new administration. Our report’s findings were titled: “Little Empirical Evidence That Arrests and Removals Are Higher Under Trump.”

Now a month later, ICE has published two new semi-monthly reports. Its latest report was published on March 14 and contained figures current as of March 8, 2025, a full month after our earlier report. Here we analyze these more recently posted numbers to assess how this administration’s record on arrests and removals now compares with that of former President Biden during his last full year in office (FY 2024).

ICE removals in this semi-monthly series are tracked as a single cumulative number since the beginning of each fiscal year. Federal fiscal years begin in October and end the following year in September. Thus, FY 2025 began in October 2024 when President Biden was still in office. Further, these two-week reporting periods don’t slice January neatly at the point President Trump assumed office on January 20. The actual cumulative reporting period ended on January 25, 2025. Nonetheless by subtracting reported removals as of January 25 from those reported on each of the more recent reports, TRAC was able to derive the number of new removals that occurred every two weeks since then. These results are shown in Table A below. To facilitate comparisons, TRAC’s table also divides new removal numbers by the number of days covered to derive a daily removal average which can then be more easily compared with the daily average under President Biden for FY 2024.

The results are actually quite shocking. Despite deploying staff from other agencies to assist in enforcement activities and ordering active-duty military to facilitate removals at the border, daily removals have failed to reach even the levels achieved by the previous administration. Indeed, President Trump’s removal record is growing worse with time rather than improving.

As we noted in our initial report, Trump’s daily removals during the period of January 26-February 8 averaged just 693. This is 6.5 percent below the higher daily average of 742 under former President Biden. Now with an additional four weeks (28 days) added to the monitoring period, Trump’s daily removals for the period January 26 through March 8 averaged only 661 removals each day. This number is not only below its initial removal rate, but 10.9 percentage points lower than Biden’s daily average of 742 .

Details for each period in Table A also show that the higher initial numbers were followed by sharply lower daily numbers of just 600 during the middle of February suggesting that after this initial push, the administration was not able to sustain its level of removal activity.

This congressionally mandated series also tracks arrests of noncitizens who were initially booked into ICE detention facilities. In contrast to removals, figures are provided as monthly totals. TRAC compiles these numbers on its QuickFacts page and provides a detailed time series going back to October 2018 for these arrest figures.

As shown in Table B, during FY 2024 an average of 759 noncitizens each day were booked into ICE detention facilities following an arrest under Biden’s administration.[2] This does not count immigrants ICE had in custody who were not detained but were subject to close monitoring through its Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. Under ATD an immigrant’s physical location was directly tracked through use of GPS ankle bracelets and other monitoring devices.[3]

Again, these congressionally mandated numbers did not exactly separate the pre and post-January period when Trump assumed office. Thus our ability to track Trump arrests started in January 26. During the initial period at the end of January (January 26-31), ICE book-ins following arrests jumped to a daily average of 1,126. However, ICE was not able to sustain this level so that in the following period ICE book-ins following arrests fell to just 724 per day. This was 4.7 percent below Biden’s daily arrests of 759 during FY 2024.

The pattern of arrest activity shows another uptick in arrests during the last week in February when daily arrests again climbed above Biden’s (909 daily arrests compared to Biden’s 759). But this has again fallen during the March 1-8 period to its lowest level of just 718 daily arrests or 5.4 percent below Biden’s numbers.

While results shown in Table B again suggest that the Trump administration is not able to sustain these higher arrests levels week after week, over the entire cumulative period of January 26 through March 8 and with a great deal of additional personnel from other agencies assisting ICE has managed to bring its average cumulative arrest daily average to 812 – a figure that is 7.0 percent higher than Biden’s record during FY 2024. But Trump’s arrest pattern is highly erratic since the most recent period in March actually showed its lowest daily average thus far – 5.4 percent lower than Biden’s.

The Trump administration continues to conceal most concrete details about its immigration enforcement activities – including where arrests are taking place, and who is being targeted and deported. It has publicized a few raids in specific locations, and chosen to publicize the arrest of named individuals as well as the removal of alleged categories of immigrants it wishes to make examples of. But a number of announced moves already taken by the Trump administration should make it easier to remove countless more immigrants in the future.[4] However, actually carrying out ever greater arrests and deportations may still pose significant challenges.

Thus, just what will actually occur remains uncertain. The need for public persistence seeking to document ICE’s actual enforcement efforts backed up with reliable numbers on arrests and removals remains of vital importance.

Footnotes

TRAC is a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research project founded in 1989. Its public website has moved from trac.syr.edu to tracreports.org. For more information, contact info@tracreports.org.