Homeland Security said ICE set new records in fiscal year 2026, deporting 483,200 people and making more than 491,000 immigration arrests. Markwayne Mullin called it the highest annual total in ICE history, even as Donald Trump said days earlier that his administration had been too tough in some cases.
The numbers landed Thursday and immediately gave the White House a fresh marker for the scale of its immigration crackdown. DHS said nearly 475,000 of the arrests were administrative arrests tied to civil immigration violations, not criminal charges, showing how much of the enforcement push has relied on civil immigration violations rather than criminal cases.
ICE also reported more than 48,000 arrests and 44,000 removals in September 2026 alone, a monthly pace that helped push the annual totals past its prior marks. Mullin said September 2026 was the best September in ICE’s history for arrests, and that the total number of ICE arrests in fiscal 2026 exceeded all three full fiscal years under Biden combined.
The funding behind that surge was already in place. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave ICE an additional $75 billion over four years, with $45 billion set aside to expand immigration detention and nearly $30 billion for personnel and enforcement operations, including arrests and deportations. In practice, that meant more agents, more detention space and more removals, all at once.
That is where the numbers start to cut against the political messaging. Trump has cast the crackdown as necessary, but he also said in a 60 Minutes interview that the administration had been too tough in some cases, saying immigrants working in landscaping and hospitality had been removed despite holding jobs and paying taxes. The record totals show an enforcement machine moving faster than the president’s own cautionary note.
By DHS’s own figures, more than 3 million migrants have left the U.S. since Trump returned to the White House, with nearly 1.2 million people deported and more than 1.25 million arrested as of October. The unanswered question is not whether ICE has expanded; it has. It is how far the administration will keep pushing before the political cost of that scale catches up with the promise of it.
