On July 1, the New York Times reported that ICE had detained 10,000 aliens in the prior five days, part of an administration push to boost immigration arrests that has “occurred without the fanfare of highly visible operations last year, in which officials announced their intentions ahead of time to target cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, and send officers pouring into the streets”. As I told the Washington Post back in March: “Most Americans favor immigration enforcement. They just don’t want to see or hear much about it.” It sounds like somebody at DHS HQ was listening.
A Brief Recap of the Biden Years
When President Trump and his “Border Czar”, Tom Homan, returned in January 2025, they encountered a disaster: the unauthorized population had increased to 15.4 million in the prior four years, 1.44 million of whom were aliens who received their “due process” and were under final orders of removal.
That problem was exacerbated by four years of policies under President Biden and his DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, that (1) opened the border to illegal immigration and (2) “de-prioritized” arrests and removals of aliens already unlawfully present in the United States, including criminals.
Specifically, under Biden and Mayorkas’s “catch and release” policies, an estimated six million illegal migrants encountered at the Southwest border were processed and released into the United States, burdening communities nationwide with massive fiscal costs (most keenly felt in big Northern cities) and imposing a crushing backlog on the immigration courts.
The number of alien “respondents” in immigration court proceedings skyrocketed in turn, rising from 1.55 million at the end of FY 2020 to 3.925 million in FY 2024 — a 153-percent increase in just four years, and one that occurred despite Biden administration efforts to quietly dispose (without disposition) of nearly one million other cases involving facially removable aliens.
Because DHS generally needs a final removal order from an immigration judge to remove most aliens from the United States, that mushrooming immigration court backlog became a chokepoint in the immigration enforcement system — but it was far from the only one.
That’s because, although few remember it, the Biden administration began with a 100-day moratorium on deportations, including removals of the most vicious and dangerous criminal aliens, fulfilling an equally little-noticed campaign promise then-candidate Joe Biden had made back in March 2024.
Though a federal district court judge quickly lifted that pause, neither the courts nor anyone else could require the Biden administration to enforce the immigration laws, regardless of the dangers aliens posed to the community or the impacts non-enforcement had on taxpayers, public safety, and national security.
Biden’s DHS followed up with more restrictions on immigration officers, culminating in September 2021, when Mayorkas imposed “guidelines” on ICE’s ability to investigate, arrest, detain, prosecute, and deport those here illegally, collectively known as “enforcement action”.
Those guidelines required ICE officers and attorneys to take utterly irrelevant “mitigating factors” (the alien’s age, mental condition, family ties, etc.) into consideration before, during, and after taking such enforcement action, which meant more criminal aliens on the streets — and a burgeoning population of illegal aliens.
The states of Texas and Louisiana pushed back, suing the administration over the social and fiscal costs Mayorkas’s non-enforcement regime was imposing on their citizens, an effort Biden’s DOJ fought all the way to the Supreme Court, where it ultimately prevailed in June 2023.
The justices concluded the states lacked judicial “standing” to sue to force immigration enforcement action, which ultimately sat poorly with voters and their representatives who saw the costs of Mayorkas’s policies all around them — leading directly to Trump’s return.
Congress responded in January 2025, passing the Laken Riley Act (LRA). That act legislatively overturned the Court and ensured states could seek legal recourse when and if DHS deliberately released illegal migrants and refused to take custody of criminal aliens again.
Reaction, Pushback, and Reaction
By then, however, a lot of damage had been done.
Trump II arrived with the immigration enforcement winds at its back, and Mayorkas’s successor Kristi Noem took voters’ displeasure over the Biden policies as a signal that she should embark on the high-profile and often confrontational enforcement operations the Times referred to on July 1.
As I noted in November, however, the department “risked losing the immigration-enforcement narrative” as high-level Democrats in many of the same states that had borne the brunt of Biden’s turbocharged border release policies flipped the script on Trump, alleging that DHS was the real danger in their communities, not the aliens the last administration had cosseted for so long.
The political fallout of two deaths of U.S. citizens during protests against DHS enforcement actions in Minnesota prompted the president to send Homan to smooth the waters in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and by the time Noem was reassigned and replaced as DHS secretary by then-Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) in March, the border czar was by all accounts calling the immigration shots.
Many immigration hawks became concerned there had been a “Minneapolis effect”, with Trump, Mullin, and Homan reining in ICE officers’ arrest and deportation efforts in response to often-violent protestors’ demands.
By early April, a new “Mass Deportation Coalition” (MDC) had assembled, publishing a “playbook” of 21 actions the administration should take to reach a target goal of at least one million deportations per year.
Trump II has begun acting on many of those recommendations, proposing new rules to restrict illegal aliens’ access to the U.S. banking system, expanding criminal prosecutions and civil fines for immigration offenses, and placing a monetary target on the back of asylum fraudsters.
“Immigrant Arrests Surge to 10,000 in 5 Days as ICE Clamps Down”
What the MDC and other immigration-enforcement hawks have been most strongly demanding though was proof DHS was actively pursuing removable aliens in the community, which brings me to the Times’s July 1 article, headlined “Immigrant Arrests Surge to 10,000 in 5 Days as ICE Clamps Down”.
Citing government documents reviewed by the outlet and interviews with unnamed officials, it begins:
Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates.
Agency leaders in recent days ordered top ICE officials to focus more of their officers’ efforts on picking up immigrants they want to deport. ... ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. The push has apparently yielded results, with recent arrest numbers roughly doubling from the 1,000 picked up each day earlier this year.
While 2,000 arrests per day might not seem like much compared to an illegal population that numbers in the millions, it’s a historically blistering pace, and one official cited by the Times questioned how long the agency would be able to maintain it.
“Word of an Uptick in Arrests Has Started to Trickle Out”
Though the arrest figure is impressive, what’s more important is the message it sends to aliens living here unlawfully.
That message is apparently landing, because the Times reports that:
Word of an uptick in arrests has started to trickle out, sowing fear in immigrant communities and among advocates already on edge after the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could end deportation protections for people from disaster- and war-torn countries under the Temporary Protected Status program.
Respectfully, the “fear” the Times contends is being sowed in those immigrant communities is little more than a realization that ICE is deporting those aliens Congress has said it must deport, and as an aside I’ll note that self-deportation is both much cheaper than physical deportation (which runs about $17,000 per alien) and more dignified for all involved.
Lincoln’s “Hen and Egg”
Perhaps some voters like seeing ICE officers and CBP agents running through streets and parking lots looking for deportable aliens and flashy videos comparing immigration arrests to Pokémon, but like Homan, I’ve been in this field for decades and understand that the best (and most popular) enforcement efforts are the ones reflected in the arrest and deportation stats — not on Tik Tok and X.
Or, as Lincoln famously quipped: “The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”
Mullin, too, wants less talk and more action on deportation, and the Times notes he’s “pledged to mount a quieter enforcement campaign” than his predecessor. But as the paper’s own reporting suggests, “quieter” doesn’t necessarily equate to fewer arrests and deportations — just less publicized ones. Now, let’s see the results.