Number Of Detained Illegal Immigrants Declines As ICE Appears to Have Ceased Enforcement

The number of detained illegal immigrants slightly declined as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have hardly arrested anyone, federal data processed by the Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows.

Around 25,000 people are currently detained at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, though Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials apprehended most of the immigrants held in the detention centers, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) Assistant Professor Austin Kocher.

ICE officials are responsible for immigration enforcement in the interior of the U.S., while CBP officials are tasked with overseeing people and items entering the country.

“Based on ICE’s public data, the total of people in civil immigration detention centers on a single day was as low as around 12,000 during the second month of the Biden administration, then doubled between March and July to over 27,000 but hasn’t grown since,” Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

ICE officials have made the lowest number of arrests in decades and haven’t increased that number since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to Kocher. ICE detention numbers peaked around 27,000 in July and have since decreased to around 25,100 as of Aug. 24.

“These numbers appear to be driven entirely by arrests by Customs and Border Protection, which tend to happen near the border,” Kocher added. “Detentions resulting from arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for interior enforcement, remains remarkably low.”

CBP officials encountered a record high of more than 212,000 migrants at the southern border in July, according to the agency. Over 1.1 million migrants have been encountered at the southern border since January.

Some migrants who were expelled under a Trump-era public health order are making several attempts to illegally cross the border, which can lead to an inaccurate tally of individuals encountered at the southern border.