Over the past 100 days, President Donald Trump and his team have aimed to fulfill the promises of a mass deportation effort that the president ran his campaign on. His appointed border czar, Tom Homan, said on Monday that the administration is on track to deport 1 million people this year, having deported 139,000 people so far, Homan said during a press conference at the White House on Monday.
But Tuesday evening, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released a statement about the number of immigrants arrested and deported from the U.S. so far in Trump’s term, saying it has “arrested 66,463 illegal aliens and removed 65,682.”
ICE’s press release included an official statement from Acting Director Todd M. Lyons, who said the administration has “removed over 65,000 illegal aliens to countries across the world.” The total number of immigrants ICE and Lyons say have been deported is significantly less than the “139,000 deportations” that Tom Homan claimed to members of the press on Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security has not released comprehensive data on the number of immigrants that have been deported since Trump took office, leaving immigration experts and data analysts to raise concerns about the lack of transparency by the administration. When asked to share more about who is included in the 139,000 figure Tom Homan quoted, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin simply said the removals are based on internal data.
The 66,463 immigrants ICE said it has arrested in Trump’s 100 days in office so far also differs from the 150,000 arrests Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimed on X Friday.
The likely explanation for the difference, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, is that ICE’s numbers focus on immigration enforcement only within the interior of the United States. Noem’s number likely includes all “encounters” at the exterior or entry points into the United States, which encompasses encounters of people with visa issues at airports — which Customs and Border Protection focuses on. Both are federal law enforcement agencies under DHS.
Reichlin-Melnick also shared on X that “the 66,463 number [of arrests] is not just “illegal aliens,” it’s all ICE arrests of noncitizens, including green card holders and those on visas.”
The total number of removals still remains uncertain, as it’s unclear whether Homan’s 139,000 deportation figure includes removals both within the interior and exterior of the United States.
But what is clear is that the number of immigrants the Trump administration is holding in immigrant detention facilities across the country is up nearly 10,000 from the 39,703 baseline number at the end of the Biden administration.
In March, about 23,000 people were booked into immigration detention, according to TRAC. Of that number, ICE arrested about 19,000 and CBP arrested about 4,000.
What we do know so far is that a growing number of immigrants in detention were arrested by ICE, which underscores the fact that there has been more immigration enforcement within the U.S. than at the border due to low border crossings so far.
Expedited removal tactics are typically carried out at the border, as previous presidential administrations have practiced, but the Trump administration has expanded such removal tactics into the interior of the country as border crossings have reached a historic low. In March 2025, U.S. Border Patrol recorded 7,181 immigrant encounters at the southwest border. In March 2024, U.S. Border Patrol recorded 137,480.
The administration is keen on fulfilling its campaign promise to deport roughly 11 million people living in the U.S. who as of 2022 lacked permanent legal status and faced the possibility of removal.
