On February 12, I dissected CBS News’s claim that “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records”. Here’s a deeper dive into the statistics so you can judge for yourself whether ICE under Trump II is breaking some sort of historical immigration-enforcement norm, but if I told you just 9.3 percent of all the agency’s street arrests involved aliens with any criminal history whatsoever, would you guess that happened under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in FY 2022? Probably not.
The Key Metrics
As I’ve explained in the past, two key metrics define DHS’s effectiveness in reducing the population of aliens unlawfully present in the United States: ICE arrests of removable aliens in the United States (“interior arrests”); and its deportations of aliens living in the United States (as opposed to entering at the border), also known as “interior removals”.
Why are those two metrics “key”? Because immigration enforcement at the border is reactive, driven by the efforts of foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally.
Administrations have tools to dissuade such entries, to be sure, and Trump II under CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott has used them to a fuller effect than any of its predecessors.
That said, if foreign nationals are going to come illegally — and smugglers are going to bring them — CBP’s only option is how it will respond to them. If no foreign nationals sought to enter the United States at the U.S.-Mexico line, Border Patrol apprehensions would be zero. If 2.2 million-plus come (as happened under Biden in FY 2022), Southwest border apprehensions will climb accordingly.
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