The White House issued a press release this week titled, “How President Trump Ended the Border Invasion and Restored American Sovereignty”. Most of what it claims is verifiable truth, but it would be helpful if DHS were to publish statistics backing up claims that, “Nearly 1.2 million illegal aliens have been deported or removed, and nearly 1.3 million illegal alien arrests have been carried out.” And let’s all hope that “Border Czar” Tom Homan’s worksite enforcement plans come to fruition.
The High Points
There are 79 different points in that release, and the best way to view them collectively is as the president’s closing immigration argument on one of his signature issues on the eve of the midterm elections.
Here are the most notable ones:
The illegal alien population has been reduced by at least 2.3 million, with more than three million migrants leaving the country during President Trump’s second term — the largest reduction in illegal immigration in modern history.
Nearly 1.2 million illegal aliens have been deported or removed, and nearly 1.3 million illegal alien arrests have been carried out.
The United States recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least 50 years.
Illegal southern border crossings were cut by 95% from Biden-era levels in FY2026, recording the lowest number of illegal border crossings in American history.
Asylum is now granted in just 7% of cases, down from more than 50% under Biden.
The immigration court backlog has been reduced from more than 4.18 million cases to under 3.09 million — the sharpest decrease in the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s history.
Immigration Court Reforms and Backlog Reductions
Immigration enforcement flows upward, from CBP admissions at the ports and border (when aliens are inspected and allowed to enter) and “encounters” (when they’re stopped and denied admission); to ICE interior investigations, arrests, and detentions of removable aliens; immigration court removal hearings; and CBP expulsions of inadmissible aliens and ICE deportations of aliens under final removal orders from the United States.
The most verifiable claims have to do with immigration judge adjudications in removal proceedings, so that’s where I will start.
Immigration courts are overseen by DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is punctilious in publishing its “workload and adjudication” statistics on a quarterly basis.
At the end of FY 2020, the last full fiscal year of the first Trump administration, 517 immigration judges faced a backlog of just fewer than 1.552 million pending removal, deportation, and exclusion cases.
By the end of FY 2024 — the last full fiscal year of the Biden administration — the number of sitting judges at EOIR had risen by 42 percent to 735, but the backlog of cases had grown by 153 percent, almost solely due to the last administration’s “catch and release” policies at the Southwest border.
Some six million aliens who were encountered at the borders and ports were released by DHS into the United States during the four years of Biden according to the House Judiciary Committee’s latest estimates, and the immigration court backlog not surprisingly rose to nearly 3.925 million pending cases.
Homan and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott each sat down with my colleague (read: “boss”) Mark Krikorian to explain how they ended releases and tightened border enforcement, but in any event, the number of new border and port cases added to EOIR dockets dropped precipitously once Trump returned.
Consequently, the immigration court backlog dropped by the end of FY 2025 for the first time in 17 fiscal years, to fewer than 3.773 million pending cases, and by July 31, 2026, had fallen further to “just” 3.47 million – an unprecedented 11.6 percent decline in 21 months.
The decline occurred even as Trump II trimmed the corps of sitting immigration judges to 634 by the end of FY 2025 (a 13.7 percent decrease), though aggressive EOIR hiring brought the total of permanent immigration judges to 662 by the end of the third quarter of FY 2026, supplemented by 53 temporary judges.
Much of that decline was thanks to new precedent opinions issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — yet another EOIR component that reviews immigration decisions — and the attorney general that provided much-needed guidance to immigration judges in adjudicating asylum claims.
That’s critical, for two reasons.
First, of the nearly 3.47 million cases pending before the courts as of July 31, 2.324 million (67 percent or two-thirds) involved some sort of asylum or related protection claim.
Second, many migrants who came illegally under Biden were more seeking the temporary opportunity to live and work here that an asylum claim provides than the permanent protection of an asylum grant itself.
If you want proof, look no further than yet another EOIR stat, which shows immigration judges issued an average of more than 10,000 in absentia removal orders per month in the first nine months of FY 2026 to aliens who had: (1) appeared in immigration court; (2) submitted an asylum application; and (3) then failed to appear for an asylum merits hearing.
That’s up from a monthly average of 623 no-shows for asylum applicants in FY 2022, and the only reason a respondent in removal proceedings would file an asylum application (Form I-589) and then fail to show up in court to request a final asylum decision is that the I-589 filing starts a 180-day clock to seek employment authorization — and a work card was all those aliens really wanted.
The Massive Increase in Border Security
Like EOIR, CBP turns square corners in issuing its encounter statistics, only it does so on a monthly basis. Here’s what the agency’s stats reveal.
Through August 31, CBP officers in the Office of Field Operations (OFO) at the nation’s ports and Border Patrol agents at the Northern, Southwest, and Coastal borders (including Puerto Rico) encountered fewer than 349,000 inadmissible alien “applicants for admission” (including illegal entrants).
That puts the agency on track for 380,600 total encounters at the end of FY 2026, 86.9 percent fewer than in Biden’s last full fiscal year (FY 2024, when there were 2.9 million encounters), and an 88.2 percent decline compared to FY 2023 (3.2 million total CBP encounters).
That said, few care how many aliens are stopped at JFK or LAX, or in Border Patrol’s New Orleans or Blaine (Wash.) sectors, but thanks to Biden and his DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, nearly every American is now interested in what happens at the U.S.-Mexico line.
In the first 11 months of FY 2026, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended fewer than 89,800 illegal migrants, with an announced preliminary FY 2026 total of 98,708 apprehensions.
That’s a 93.5-percent decline compared to FY 2024 (1.530 million), 95.2 percent fewer apprehensions than in FY 2023 (2.046 million), and just 4.45 percent as many apprehensions by Border Patrol at the Southwest border as in FY 2022 (2.206 million).
Again, you can go to our website and hear Homan and Scott explain how CBP gained operational control of the Southwest border so quickly, but based on the reduction in the flow of illegal migrants there, as I noted in August, this border is more secure than it’s ever been in history — or at least since records have been kept.
Border Drug Apprehensions Up, Domestic Overdose Deaths Down
As the White House announced in that press release:
Nearly one million pounds of narcotics have been seized through Customs and Border Protection in FY2026 (63% above the prior four-year average).
Fentanyl trafficking at the southern border collapsed by 56%, and fentanyl-linked deaths plunged 22% in a single year.
Drug overdoses have fallen by more than 40% from the Biden-era peak.
America recorded its lowest overall death rate ever in 2025, driven in large part by sharp declines in drug fatalities.
With fewer illegal migrants to stop and process, it should come as no surprise that both CBP officers in OFO and Border Patrol agents are now better positioned under Trump II to find and seize deadly illegal drugs coming north from Mexico and points beyond.
Cartel leaders aren’t going to admit defeat and open bowling alleys and start petting zoos instead, and drug smugglers don’t have many other marketable skills, so you can expect criminals running narcotics into this country to adapt and change their strategies.
But such “cat-and-mouse” games are much easier for the “cats” to win when there are fewer “mice” to chase, and that’s the set-up along the Rio Grande and through the Sonoran Desert thanks to Trump, Homan, and Scott.
DHS Arrests and Removals
Which brings me to the White House’s claims about the massive uptick in Trump II DHS arrests and removals, and the subsequent decline in the unauthorized population in the United States.
My colleagues Steve Camarota and Karen Ziegler have estimated that the overall foreign-born population (legal and illegal) fell by 2.9 million between January 2025 and July 2026. They further estimated that the illegal population, in particular, declined 2.3 million, from 15.8 to 13.5 million over this time period, supporting the White House’s claim of a substantial decline in illegal immigrants in the country.
Camarota and Ziegler concluded that net migration — the number of people coming vs. leaving the country — between 2025 and 2026 was very likely negative for the first time since the Great Depression.
The only contention in that October 20 press release I can’t verify through official sources is that “nearly 1.2 million illegal aliens have been deported or removed, and nearly 1.3 million illegal alien arrests have been carried out” since Trump’s return.
Unlike many on both the right and the left, I am not unconvinced by such figures and will accept them at face value for now. But as with EOIR and CBP statistics, I’d like to see the official numbers for myself.
Call me jaded, but over my 34-year immigration career, I’ve seen administrations in both parties “cook the books” on such stats, as my colleague Dan Cadman would say, and serve them up to the American people flavored with whatever agenda they wanted to present.
It’s certainly possible that immigration officers have arrested tens of thousands of removable aliens per month since Trump returned and have “deported and removed” tens of thousands of them monthly — which would get you to the announced figures pretty quickly.
The problem is that past administrations have added Border Patrol “turnarounds” and OFO port returns to the removal and deportation count, bolstering those totals and presenting a less-than-accurate view of how well ICE is performing in the interior.
As I recently explained, two key metrics define the effectiveness of ICE’s enforcement strategies: immigration officer arrests of removable aliens living here (“interior arrests”); and their deportations of aliens found in the interior of the United States (as opposed to illegal migrants apprehended by CBP at the border), known as “interior removals”.
In FY 2009, ICE recorded nearly 238,000 interior removals and ICE officers made nearly 301,500 interior arrests.
Those are almost definitely all-time records (pre-Trump II, at least), only possible because then-President George W. Bush was setting the table for what he hoped would be a massive amnesty by demonstrating the resolve to enforce the immigration laws Congress had written.
Obama and Biden also wanted amnesty, but neither cared enough to spend the political capital such an effort would require, so instead they throttled both interior arrests and removals by imposing irrelevant enforcement “priorities” on ICE.
Trump I attempted to roll back those restrictions on ICE, but a border surge of migrant families in FY 2019 slowed the effort and soon the Covid-19 pandemic (and court-imposed restrictions on detention space) made any increase in interior enforcement all-but impossible.
Trump II started hot out of the gate on both interior arrests and removals (aided in no small part by a lack of enforcement during the Biden and Mayorkas years), but often ham-fisted operations spurred on by now-departed DHS officials quickly poisoned public opinion on ICE immigration enforcement.
That has forced Homan and new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to recraft ICE’s interior enforcement strategies to boost interior enforcement while avoiding high-profile and often contentious ICE arrests of aliens in public places, and media reports suggest they have been wildly successful in doing so.
Nonetheless, no official numbers have been published since November 2024, and many are skeptical because the former Trump II officials alluded to above were sometimes given to enforcement puffery, as well.
Two Dirty Secrets About ICE Interior Arrests
Don’t count me among the skeptics, however.
That’s because of two dirty secrets about ICE enforcement that most are either unaware of or never talk about.
The first is that the vast majority of ICE interior arrests over the past two decades have been “custodial arrests”, when immigration officers take criminal aliens directly from federal, state, and local custody.
As I recently reported, three-quarters, 75 percent, of all ICE interior arrests between FY 2008 and FY 2019 were custodial, and in FY 2020, that figure climbed to nearly 77 percent.
It was only under the “kinder, gentler” Biden regime in FY 2022 (40.2 percent) and 2023 (46.4 percent) that fewer than half of ICE interior arrests involved aliens taken from some other law enforcement agency’s custody, likely because Biden’s DHS was now cooking the interior enforcement books, too, and because Mayorkas largely barred immigration officers from arresting criminal aliens.
If ICE were to now open the books on its claimed 1.3 million Trump II arrests, they’d likely reveal that the agency has returned to the “custodial arrest” model that has proven so successful in the past, and that likely wouldn’t sit well with those on the right who want larger-scale enforcement.
The other dirty secret is that the only other real alternative (or supplement) to a custodial-arrest-focused ICE interior arrest strategy is a massive increase in “worksite enforcement” of alien workers at their places of employment.
Both Krikorian and I are big fans of such “briefcase immigration enforcement”, for two reasons.
First, it’s safer than “street arrests” of removable aliens, and much more protected from interference by anti-ICE “activists”. Second, it works.
In her 1984 majority opinion in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, a case challenging the legality of immigration arrests of illegal aliens at their places of employment, Justice O’Connor noted that: “In the course of a year, the average [immigration] agent arrests almost 500 illegal aliens.”
That was two years before Congress codified worksite enforcement and outlawed the hiring of illegal workers in section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), but if ICE were doing worksite enforcement at the same rate today, immigration officers would be making more than three million interior arrests annually.
ICE has attempted to expand worksite enforcement under both Trump I and Trump II, but both times powerful forces with the president’s ear seemingly swooped in and shut it down.
Here’s an ICE headline from the first Trump administration: “Worksite Enforcement investigations surge in FY18”. And here’s one from April 2025: “ICE arrests over 1K illegal workers, proposes $1M in fines”.
Since then? Largely crickets, with a smattering of arrests at places like racetracks, car washes, and massage parlors, avoiding the sorts of large-scale enterprises where bigger numbers of illegal aliens are likely to be employed.
But you know who else likes worksite enforcement? Tom Homan.
He appeared on Fox News’s Big Weekend Show on Saturday to deny “mass deportations” aren’t occurring, while noting: “Worksite enforcement needs to happen. We need to send a message to the whole world: It's illegal to knowingly hire illegal aliens at work, and if you can't get a job, you're not going to come.”
He also stated he’s bringing a former official (not me) “out of retirement” to quarterback his worksite plans, which have been cleared through ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and are “sitting on” Mullins’s “desk right now”.
If you agree with Krikorian, Homan, and me on briefcase enforcement, hope those plans clear the secretary and make it to the White House as quickly as humanly possible.
Achievements and Questions
There is no question the border is more secure against the illegal entry of both drugs and migrants, that immigration courts are functioning quicker and more smoothly, and that ICE is better enforcing the law today than was the case under Biden. Kudos to Homan, Scott, and the rest, but please, Mr. President — show us the stats.