Immigration enforcement continues to be a major goal of the government agenda of Donald Trump and his loyalists. For this reason, the administration has asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executives to increase the number of daily arrests to 3,000, for an annual total that would exceed one million.
The new goal, which triples arrest figures from the beginning of 2025, was communicated to ICE leadership by Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. The meeting involved officials from the enforcement and removal operations (ERO) division and the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division.
ERO is responsible for immigration enforcement, including arrests, detentions, and deportations, while HSI focuses on investigating transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, and the spread of online child abuse.
The new goal set by the Trump administration has put various immigrant advocates on edge.
Nayna Gupta, the policy director for the American Immigration Council, has shined the light of reality on the figures and the effort, saying, “Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies”.
Jesse Franzblau, Associate Director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center, explained instead, “The sweeping ICE raids and arrests are hitting families, longtime residents, children and communities in a way never seen before”.
However, even if the new goal of 3,000 daily arrests were met, it would fall far short of Trump’s campaign promises to deport 15 to 20 million immigrants.
The number of people detained by ICE reached 49,000 last May 18, an increase of little more than 10,000 since the Republican president took office. The agency uses local jails and already overcrowded federal prisons to detain immigrants. Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University who closely monitors immigrant detention data, commented on the target of 3,000 daily arrests, “ The big question for me is: where are they going to put people?”.
