What do the numbers show about Trump’s immigration enforcement record?

InternationalWhat do the numbers show about Trump's immigration enforcement record?By Reuters -Apr 22, 2026US President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since taking office in 2025. ARRESTS Trump won back the White House promising record numbers of deportations. Trump administration budget documents show that U.S. Immigration and Customs ​Enforcement aims to deport 1 million immigrants per year. ICE cast a wider net than under former President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, launching broad enforcement sweeps in major US cities and picking up more ‌non-criminals. Top White House official Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, pressed ICE to escalate operations in mid-2025. Miller set a quota for at least 3,000 arrests per day and told ICE leadership they should target anyone without legal status. Under the aggressive push, ICE and US Border Patrol agents surged into major cities, sweeping through neighborhoods in search of immigration offenders and clashing with residents. Federal immigration officers came under scrutiny in Los Angeles, ​Chicago and Minneapolis, where officers shot and killed two US citizens. As public support for Trump’s immigration policies declined, Trump border czar Tom Homan said in late January the agency would move ​to a more focused approach to enforcement. The daily average of ICE arrests rose to 1,300 in December 2025, according to agency figures obtained ⁠by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Reuters, far higher than the daily average of 350 over the decade prior to Trump’s second term. ICE arrests in early March fell ​to about 1,000 per day, the statistics show, still well above the historic norm. DETENTION ICE statistics show the number of people arrested by the agency with no other criminal charges or convictions and ​then detained rose from about...