McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — The acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is accusing the Biden administration of improperly inflating migrant arrest numbers and “misleading the American people.”
“The Biden administration was cooking the books,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said during a call with reporters Wednesday.
“They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests. A comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE, and we found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests, when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities,” Lyons said.
“The previous administration counted these arrests, even though no immigration enforcement action was taken,” he said.
But he says that has drastically changed.
“We have returned ICE to its core mission, which is arresting people who violate our immigration laws,” Lyons said.
Senior DHS officials said the number of at-large active arrests made by ICE agents since President Donald Trump almost equals total ICE at-large arrests for all of Fiscal Year 2024, which was under most of the Biden administration’s reign.
During Fiscal Year 2024, ICE officers made 113,431 arrests.
But senior DHS officials on Wednesday said those weren’t really arrests, but called them “pass through arrests” because they said the overwhelming majority of those cases were ICE officers processing new immigrant arrivals, not conducting enforcement actions, like detention or removals.
“This distinction matters a lot when you’re looking at year over year numbers. In all of Fiscal Year 2024, ICE Enforcement Removal Operations made 33,242 of these at-large arrest. Only 29% of all ICE arrests were a result of interior enforcement,” a senior DHS official said.
But under the Trump administration, from Jan. 20 through March 10, ICE has already made 32,809 arrests, which included at-large arrests, a DHS senior official said.
“When you do the math, it shows that in just 50 days, our officers have already arrested just short of all the at large arrests made last fiscal year,” the official said.
Of the ICE arrests made so far under the Trump administration, 14,111 immigrants, or 43%, are convicted criminals, and 9,980, or 30%, have pending charges, and 1,155 are suspected gang members, a senior ICE official said.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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