The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on Thursday that it reached the highest numbers of deportations and immigrant arrests in its 23-year history, with over 483,000 expulsions and 491,000 detentions during fiscal year 2026, under the administration of President Donald Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that ICE conducted exactly 483,200 deportations during the period from October 1, 2025, to September 30, 2026, surpassing the previous record of 442,640 set in fiscal year 2025.
The figure represents an increase of approximately 9% compared to the previous period and 78% compared to the 271,480 deportations recorded in fiscal year 2024, the last full year of Joe Biden's presidency.
In terms of arrests, ICE reported more than 491,000 immigration arrests, of which approximately 475,000 were administrative, meaning they were related to alleged civil violations of immigration laws, not necessarily involving the commission of criminal offenses.
According to data reviewed by the Associated Press, the number of administrative arrests reached 474,850, almost double the 239,890 recorded in 2025 and more than four times the 113,430 in 2024.
An important detail: the official report does not specify how many of the detained individuals had criminal records, unlike the breakdowns that ICE had published in previous years. It also does not allow for the determination of what proportion of the arrests involved immigrants without a criminal history.
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, celebrated the results and attributed the increase in operations to the immigration policies implemented by Trump.
“I could not be more proud of the brave men and women of ICE, who have just broken more historical records,” Mullin stated in the announcement.
The official stated that fiscal year 2026 recorded the highest annual figures for arrests and deportations in the agency's history and defended the work of its agents as part of the administration's efforts to strengthen national security.
The data also shows that September concluded with over 48,000 arrests and 44,000 deportations, following several consecutive months of significant migratory activity.
In August, ICE had reached a monthly record of 50,925 arrests, surpassing the figures from July and June. The increase coincided with the expansion of operations and greater collaboration between federal authorities and state and local police.
Precisely, a research published at the end of September documented ICE's change in tactics, which increased arrests through cooperation agreements with local and state police forces, in addition to less visible operations in American communities.
The increase in arrests during the summer, however, had not initially translated into a proportional rise in expulsions.
The preliminary data examined in September indicated that effective deportations remained around 1,200 per day, due to legal, logistical, and diplomatic hurdles.
The new DHS figures reflect ICE's annual balance, but they do not necessarily correspond to the total number of formal expulsions carried out by all U.S. immigration agencies.
Federal statistics differentiate between formal expulsions, returns, and voluntary departures, categories that may yield different outcomes depending on the methodology used.
In fact, an analysis published on Wednesday by the research center TRAC at Syracuse University found that the formal expulsions recorded by the DHS had decreased compared to the beginning of Trump's second term.
The research used individual records obtained through public information requests and examined a more specific category than the total announced by ICE.
The distinction also appears in a report from the Migration Policy Institute released in October, which estimated that the Trump administration was maintaining a pace of approximately 660,000 deportations annually, below its target of one million, even accounting for the operations of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The intensification of arrests has also had consequences for the Cuban community residing in the United States.
Data published in September revealed that arrests of Cubans by ICE had increased by 463% between late 2024 and early 2026, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute.
That report also indicated that, by January 2026, there were 42,084 Cubans with pending final deportation orders in the United States, while immigration operations continued to affect communities in South Florida.
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