EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took to X on Friday to tout recent arrests of migrants accused of sex assaults and violent crimes such as murder and robbery.
“Every day I get a report of individuals we have arrested in this country and gotten out that have been perpetuating violence against our communities and endangering families,” Noem said.
In her 50-second monologue, she made a claim that drew scrutiny.
“Since President Trump has been in office – just a few short weeks – we have arrested and deported over 150,000 individuals, many of them incredibly dangerous, (so) that now communities are much safer,” Noem said.
Flipping over photos of some of the offenders, she thanked President Trump for “his leadership so dirtbags like these are no longer in the United States of America.”
Migrant apprehensions at the Southwest border have been falling since last June and have outright plummeted since Trump took office on Jan. 20. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported barely 7,181 migrant encounters in March, a 95 percent decrease from the 137,473 apprehended in March 2024.
The previous month, February 2025, border apprehensions totaled only 8,346.
Critics surmised that this would require the administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport a massive number of people from the country’s interior.
“I do not believe this number is an ICE arrest number. There have been 93 full days since (the) inauguration. One-hundred and fifty thousand would mean average daily ICE arrests of 1,613,” tweeted Aaron Richlin-Melnick, an immigration attorney and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
He said reports suggest ICE has struggled to reach a goal of 1,000 arrests per day.
“So, something fishy is going on here,” he said.
In a report released on Thursday, the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute said ICE arrests have more than doubled from an average of 310 a day in 2024 to 650 a day as of mid-March.
Reichlin-Melnick later said ICE arrests plus CBP encounters potentially add up to the 150,000 Noem touted.
“Of course, using CBP inadmissible data in a tally of ‘arrests’ is deceptive since it includes people with visa issues turned around at the border at land and air ports-of-entry — and that’s quite a high number, around 20,000 a month,” Reichlin-Melnick tweeted. “It would be 40 percent of Noem’s 150,000 figure.”
Trump may not deport a million a year, but the impact on immigration could be ‘historic.’
The Migration Policy Institute said ICE increased detention capacity from 41,500 beds last year to 54,000 in March, though only 47,000 were occupied.
The organization includes one of its directors, Doris Meissner, former immigration commissioner during the Clinton administration, who reported ICE is arresting most unauthorized immigrants being removed from the interior of the country inside local jails and state prisons under agreements such as 287(g).
To ramp up arrests, the administration has already tripled the number of such agreements, from 135 in December to 456 as of this week—with another 107 applications pending.
It also has done away with restrictions on arresting people in churches, schools, and hospitals, and is requiring undocumented immigrants to come forward, register and volunteer biometrical information, or face criminal penalties.
Full implementation of the Laken Riley Act – which authorizes arrests of unauthorized immigrants who commit even low-level crimes – is pending Congressional funding for tens of thousands of additional detention facility beds, MPI reported.
The organization nonetheless expects Trump to continue to increase deportations “with all available tools and resources.”
That will have a historic impact on the U.S. immigration system even if the administration doesn’t achieve its purported goal of 1 million deportations per year, MPI said.
