MINNEAPOLIS — Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and deported more people during the last fiscal year than at any time in its 23-year history, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday, as U.S. President Donald Trump followed through on promises of mass deportations that helped win back the White House but also fueled the political blowback that led to Democrats’ overwhelming victory in last week’s midterm elections. ICE said it deported 483,200 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the highest number since 2014, when 405,090 people were deported under former President Barack Obama, when some activists labeled him the “deporter in chief.” The 2026 numbers were up nine per cent from its previous high of 442,640 in the same period a year earlier and up 78 per cent from 271,480 in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency. ICE had not released such counts since Donald Trump returned to the White House, including for 2025. “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Yet much remained unsaid in the DHS press release, including how many deportees had criminal histories and a detailed breakdown of the statistics. In addition, deportation numbers can be notoriously fuzzy, with totals counted in different ways in different years. “It is accurate that ICE is making record numbers of arrests,” said Marc R. Rosenblum, a visiting fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former top official overseeing statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. “They have record resources. They’ve doubled their staffing. They’re getting a lot of support from other law enforcement agencies.” But the sparse data in Wednesday’s announcement means “we can’t really see what’s going on in any kind of detailed way.” Trump had campaigned on ridding America of criminal migrants, saying he’d be targeting the “worst of the worst.” But that is rarely the case. In July, for instance, only roughly one-quarter of deportees had criminal convictions, according to the Deportation Data Project. More than half weren’t even facing charges. The numbers released Wednesday also fell well short of the White House goal of 1 million deportations annually, a promise it made when it received billions in additional funding from Congress, supercharging the government’s immigration bureaucracy. Trump returned to power last year promising to end illegal crossings at the southern border. His administration has pushed through restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration and speeded up deportations. Immigration crackdown operations are often purposefully high-profile, in part to frighten migrants into leaving of their own accord. But the crackdown hasn’t always gone as planned. The biggest shift came earlier this year in Minneapolis, when more than 2,000 federal officers were deployed to the city and thousands of protesters turned out to confront masked and often heavily armed agents spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles. Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 — were killed in confrontations with agents, and the administration quickly backed away from high-profile operations. While arrests dropped after the killings, they quickly returned to record numbers, albeit in quieter immigration sweeps. By last week’s elections the White House’s immigration message had splintered, with even some deeply Republican rural areas voting Democratic after people saw longtime migrant neighbors, many of them key workers on farms, ranches and meat processing facilities, taken in arrests. The highest recorded number of deportations on record came during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s crackdown on illegal immigrants from Mexico. The often-chaotic policy saw deportation numbers spike dramatically in the early 1950s, cresting at 1.1 million in 1954. Tim Sullivan, The Associated Press
