USA Today: White House broadcasts immigration raids, but are arrests really up?
This article originally appeared in USA Today on February 22, 2025.
BY: Lauren Villagran, Rick Jervis and Trevor Hughes
Wearing a bulletproof vest in New York City, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem faced the camera and made herself clear: “We’re going to get these dirtbags off the street," she said.
The video of the Jan. 28 immigration raid, along with dozens of others since shared by Noem and the White House, show a barrage of activity by ICE and other federal agents as they rush to execute President Donald Trump's promised mass deportations.
But despite the media blitz projecting images of an unrelenting nationwide sweep, so far the deportation of migrants is well below the monthly average during the Biden administration, and there is little evidence ICE is arresting or detaining any more people than usual.
As did the Biden administration, the White House and ICE are selectively releasing numbers to news media rather than publishing them, declining to provide them to USA TODAY, for instance, while releasing some to Reuters late Friday. The lack of transparency tells some experts and even some far-right activists who support Trump that things aren't going as well as the White House wants.
"If the data was out there and transparent, it would undermine their story," said Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration.
Immigration detention data – which ICE must publish every two weeks under a congressional mandate – show a slight increase in immigrants in custody in February compared with the prior two months. But fewer than half of those detained have criminal records or pending charges other than an immigration violation, according to the data.
ICE experimented with transparency in the first days of the new administration, capitalizing on Trump's desire to harness the media to show voters he intended to deliver results.
For nine consecutive days after he took office, ICE posted an "enforcement update" online tallying its arrests. The posts showed daily arrest numbers ticking up as Trump took office: 538 to 956, then 1,179. Then they stagnated, dipped and didn't budge.
ICE stopped reporting the numbers.
Controlling the narrative
The move angered some Trump supporters, who want to see the president deliver quickly on the signature promise of his presidential campaign.
Citing data provided to The Washington Post, far-right pundit Nick Fuentes posted on X, "ICE arrests have collapsed to (less than) <600 per day in February, or ~220k per year," below the pace of the Biden administration last year.
The Trump administration "says it stopped publishing daily numbers to 'conserve resources,'" Fuentes wrote. "Sure."
Trump has repeatedly promised to remove millions of immigrants in the country illegally, first targeting those with criminal records. To remove even 1 million immigrants a year, ICE would have to arrest and deport an average of 2,700 people a day.
In its first month, according to data provided to Reuters, the Trump administration deported 37,660 migrants, compared with a monthly average of 57,000 deportations during the last year of the Biden administration. Trump officials explained to Reuters that the Biden administration focused on deporting recent border crossers, who can be removed more quickly.
Illegal border crossings have dropped dramatically from a year ago. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported fewer than 82,000 migrant encounters in January versus more than 242,000 encounters during the same month a year ago.
Neither the White House nor ICE, nor its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, responded to repeated requests from USA TODAY for arrest and deportation data or interviews with key officials.
Jennie Murray, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a nonpartisan think tank, applauded ICE for providing that initial transparency, but seeing it disappear "is troubling," she told USA TODAY.
"We want to make sure we can see that they are truly prioritizing violent criminals, because the American people have said that’s what they want," she said.
An ICE spokesman, who declined to be identified by name, told USA TODAY the agency has stopped releasing arrest and deportation numbers while it prepares an online portal with monthly data, akin to what U.S. Customs and Border Protection provides on illegal border crossings.
ICE has "significantly increased its immigration enforcement activities," the spokesman said in a statement. The new portal is "an effort to keep the American people informed about the results of our efforts with only the most accurate information."
Kocher, who has used formal Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain detailed ICE statistics in the past, said: "If they wanted to publish daily detailed records, they could. They don’t do it, because it would take some power from them to control the narrative."
Deterrence or performance?
During the nine-day stretch when ICE posted daily stats, the agency reported 8,276 arrests, or fewer than 1,000 people a day on average. But millions of people in the U.S. tuned in to watch raids on nightly newscasts or clicked on deportation videos on Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok.
Former ICE officials have conflicting takes on whether the media onslaught represents an effective messaging campaign to deter illegal immigration or whether the cameras and social media presence are hurting law enforcement operations – and making it harder for the administration to achieve higher arrest numbers.
Jerry Robinette, former head of the San Antonio office of Homeland Security Investigations under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said he has never seen the level of publicity unfurling today.
He hopes the raids beam into social media feeds and living rooms around the world and are seen by those thinking of crossing into the U.S. illegally, he said.
“Hopefully, this will have a deterrent effect, that this administration is serious about enforcing immigration law,” Robinette said. “There’s going to be a message: ‘We’re going to try to bring back integrity to the immigration laws.’”
But broadcasting every aspect of daily immigration enforcement could also imperil missions, said John Sandweg, former ICE acting director under the Obama administration.
It risks jeopardizing agent safety if details of a raid are leaked, he said. And it could lead to what’s known as “diminished effectiveness.” The more a community hears about immigration enforcement – or sees it on screen – the less likely the target will be handcuffed, Sandweg said.
During similar operations when he oversaw ICE, agents had a roughly 90% chance of apprehending their intended subjects on the first day of raids. That dropped to 80% the following day and fell by 10% each day thereafter as families hid or alerted potential suspects, he said.
“The reason you never hear about these operations, typically, is because the cardinal rule when you do these at-large operations is: You don’t discuss them until the operation is done,” he said.
“There’s no good operational reason – zero, period – to be publicizing it in this manner.”
Raids for gang members turn up short
Standing in front of an Aurora, Colorado, apartment complex on Feb. 5, then-ICE acting director Caleb Vitello spoke to the camera from the parking lot.
"We're here today to conduct an at-large enforcement operation looking for Tren de Aragua members," he said in a video posted on social media.
Another post confirmed that ICE and other federal agencies were targeting "100-plus" members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, at the Aurora complex. Dozens of media organizations reported the news.
But after the cameras had left, ICE refused to say what it had accomplished. The agency didn't respond to requests for information about the raid. On Feb. 7, ABC reported that feds arrested one suspected gang member and detained 29 other people.
On Friday, in the latest sign the White House isn't happy with the direction, Vitello was removed from his post.
Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, defended the agency's decision to broadcast raids in a CBS News interview in late January.
“It’s not a spectacle,” she told CBS. “This is our nation’s law enforcement, judicial process. The scales of justice are equally applied to everybody. We want transparency on this.”
'People are disappearing'
The immigration enforcement agency has ramped up its rhetoric and is preparing to house an additional 30,000 detainees on U.S. military bases, one of several moves that could clear the way for additional arrests and deportations.
But ICE hasn't published a roster of who is being arrested, what crimes they are accused of, or whether they will face prosecution, detention or deportation.
That's unlike the U.S. criminal justice system, in which jails report a list of those in custody and the charges they face, and court hearings are open to the public.
After the raids around Denver, Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, struggled to find a trail to those arrested.
Typically, following a mass law enforcement action, pending criminal charges are accessible in the public record. But there were none after the recent raids, seemingly because there weren't any criminal arrests made, which made it impossible to decipher who was picked up, Lunn said. ICE is also not releasing that information, she said.
"We get lots and lots of communication on the front end when it comes to a display of force and might," she said, "but almost zero communication when someone's arrested and in the belly of the whale."
In recent weeks, Lunn said, she has been contacted by people whose relatives were arrested, even though they were in the process of obtaining a green card. Another community member sought answers after learning a relative had been flown to an ICE facility on the naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba – only after seeing his name listed in The New York Times.
"This should be terrifying to folks in our country that people are disappearing," she said. "Our federal government is rounding up people in our community and not telling anyone what happened to them."
Numbers don't reflect a big increase
If the Trump administration is arresting significantly more people, it isn't reflected in the publicly reported detention numbers. The average daily population in ICE detention rose to 41,600 in February – ICE's current capacity – from 39,000 in December.
About 18,500 people, or 44%, of those in ICE custody in mid-February had a criminal conviction or pending charges. More than half of those in custody had no criminal record.
Publicizing immigration enforcement could benefit the agency and the president's goals, said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration.
But prime-time raids in big cities pull agents away from more serious investigations, he said.
“All I see is a condensing of national ICE enforcement removal work into one metropolitan area," Houser said, "and then spinning it up in the media and showing a lot of battle-rattle and bluster."