Over 20,000 illegal migrants arrested during first month of Trump's presidency

The Trump administration launched an immigration crackdown in the moments after his inauguration and publicized daily arrest totals during his first couple of weeks in office.

The pace of at-large arrests — meaning those done in the community — exceeded the Biden administration. In the last fiscal year, under Biden, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted around 33,000 at-large arrests.

“President Trump and this Administration are saving lives every day because of the actions we are taking to secure the border and deport illegal alien criminals. Hundreds of thousands of criminals were let into this country illegally. We are sending them home, and they will never be allowed to return,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement Wednesday.

Senior Trump officials have expressed frustration with the pace of arrests, resulting in the removal of the acting ICE director last week.

Trump has made some recent moves to increase the number of arrests, including directing ICE agents to track down and deport thousands of migrant children who entered the country without their parents, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters.

His administration is also considering a war-time authority to speed up deportations for certain undocumented immigrants.

Several of the Trump administration’s other directives have been held up in court, including the most recent decision by a federal judge in Seattle halting Trump’s order to suspend refugee admissions and funding.

On February 20, the US organized a deportation flight to Costa Rica, planning to relocate 135 undocumented migrants, nearly half of whom were minors.

Trump administration suspended the processing of all immigration visas submitted by citizens from Latin America and Ukraine.