Around 400 people a day are being taken into ICE custody without so much as a parking ticket to their name—a number that exceeds the agency’s total average daily arrests under Donald Trump’s first presidency.
Trump, 79, has spent two years describing those caught in the dragnet —now being overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48—as the “worst of the worst.” But the agency’s own numbers paint a very different picture.
The eye-opening figure emerged from budget testimony delivered last Thursday to the House Appropriations Homeland Security subcommittee by outgoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Todd Lyons, 52. Lyons resigned his post the same evening as he pitched lawmakers for an additional $10 billion in fiscal 2027.
“We’ve significantly increased our operational tempo since Jan. 20. We’ve arrested nearly 457,000 aliens,” he told the subcommittee, noting that more than 281,000 of the people detained had been flagged by ICE as having “criminal histories.”
Subtract that 281,000, and the remainder is some 176,000 people with no record at all, which works out to roughly 405 “administrative” arrests every 24 hours over the 435-day period Lyons was referring to.
In FY2020, the final full year of Trump’s first administration, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division logged 103,603 administrative arrests, per the agency’s own annual report—an average of 284 per day.
Broaden the analysis to all four fiscal years of Trump’s first presidency, and the story doesn’t change. Between FY2017 and FY2020, ICE notched a combined 548,753 administrative arrests across 1,461 days—a running daily average of roughly 376, according to the agency’s own annual reports.
Individual years swung from FY2018’s 434-per-day peak to FY2020’s pandemic-flattened 283.
Today’s 405-a-day no-record average clears that four-year average from Trump’s first term—without even counting any of the 281,000 people the agency has flagged as having a criminal history.
For comparison, Joe Biden’s ICE made 113,431 administrative arrests in fiscal 2024, per USAFacts, averaging 311 per day.
Even ICE’s 281,000 “criminal histories” column is curious. It encompasses immigration-only offenses such as unlawful entry or re-entry after removal, low-level traffic violations, and charges filed against a person that never resulted in a conviction.
The Daily Beast revealed in November—citing leaked ICE data—that close to three out of every four detainees held by the agency carried no criminal conviction, and that only one in 20 had been convicted of a violent offense. Immigration-only book-ins were running roughly level with violent-crime book-ins.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for comment.
