The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE, by its English acronym) has announced this Thursday that, during the last fiscal year, it has reached the highest volume of arrests and expulsions of migrants since the agency was created more than twenty years ago.
As the Department of Homeland Security detailed in an official note, over the course of the fiscal year, 483,200 people were deported, which implies a 9% increase compared with the previous year, when 442,640 deportations were recorded in the same period. This latest figure already represented a 78% increase compared with 2024, when 271,480 expulsions were counted, coinciding with the last year of Democratic President Joe Biden’s term.
The number of deportations from the last fiscal year is also eight times higher than that of Biden’s first complete year in the White House, in which 59,000 expulsions took place. In cumulative terms, the deportations of this year exceed the total of the three years of the former president’s term added together.
At the same time, in the last twelve months, 491,000 arrests have been recorded, double the 239,890 of the previous fiscal year and more than four times the 113,430 of 2024. Of that total, 475,000 people remain in administrative custody.
Only in September, the ICE federal agents carried out more than 48,000 detentions and 44,000 deportations. These figures represent a 30% increase in detentions for that same month compared with the figures compiled under the Biden Administration.
"I could not be more proud of the brave men and women of ICE, who have just set new historical records," the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has said. "Fiscal Year 2026 recorded the highest number of deportations and arrests carried out by ICE in its entire history," he has emphasized.
Mullin also stressed that September 2026 was, "in terms of arrests, the best September month in the agency’s history." "The total number of arrests carried out by ICE in Fiscal Year 2026 exceeded the sum of the three complete fiscal years under the Biden Administration," the document states.
"ICE’s patriots work tirelessly, day and night, to make the United States a safe place again. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, ICE has been given the green light to locate and deport foreigners in an irregular situation, in order to save American lives," he has asserted, before highlighting that "under Trump’s leadership, more than 1.2 million foreigners in an irregular situation have been deported and more than 1.25 million have been detained".