Compare the current Ice procedures to those of Obama
Executive summary
The Biden-era ICE procedures largely restore the Obama administration’s enforcement priorities—focusing first on national-security and serious criminal threats and on prosecutorial discretion—while adding oversight and reporting requirements that were absent under Trump [1] [2]. Key contrasts with the Obama years appear in operational emphasis (worksite raids, detainer practices) and in the politics and public scrutiny around arrest and removal numbers, where interpretations diverge sharply among analysts and former officials [3] [4] [5].
1. Prioritization: back to targeting violent and national-security threats
Biden’s interim guidance explicitly mirrors the Obama-era structure by prioritizing individuals convicted of or suspected of terrorism or espionage and by prioritizing recent unlawful entrants with fewer U.S. ties next—marking a departure from broader Trump-era priorities that targeted virtually all unlawful presence [1] [2]. The Biden rules also omit some lesser criminal convictions that Obama guidance had included as a lower-level priority, reflecting a narrower, threat-focused approach than some past formulations [1]. Analysts within the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force and others characterize this as a “return” rather than a wholesale reinvention of Obama-era policy [1].
2. Prosecutorial discretion and operational guardrails
The Biden guidance restores Obama-era recommendations on prosecutorial discretion—giving ICE authorities latitude to avoid enforcement against lower-risk noncitizens—and layers in new oversight mechanisms such as weekly reporting from field offices to the Office of the Director and Office of Policy and Planning [1]. These reporting requirements represent an administrative tightening intended to track enforcement actions more closely than during the Trump years, and they echo Obama-era attempts to systematize when and how ICE uses discretion [1].
3. Worksite enforcement: silent audits vs. large-scale raids
Both Obama and Biden administrations moved away from the Trump-era practice of largescale workplace raids; Obama ended mass public workplace raids and favored “silent raids” and Form I-9 audits targeting employers, and Biden officially ended largescale worksite raids in 2021 while shifting emphasis toward employer sanctions [3]. That continuity means current ICE worksite tactics look more like the Obama playbook—focused on employer accountability—until policy changes or new administrations revive aggressive inspection-and-arrest operations [3].
4. Detainers, local cooperation and the federal-local divide
The Obama-era record helped spawn programs like Secure Communities that tied local law enforcement to ICE; Biden moved to untangle some of those ties by rescinding federal grant-conditional cooperation and signaling less routine handover of noncitizens arrested by local police [6]. The historical use and controversies of ICE detainers under Bush and Obama remain background context for current debates, but specifics about how detainer practice has changed under Biden compared with Obama require more granular data than these sources provide [6] [7].
5. Numbers, optics and competing narratives about removals
Obama’s administration oversaw substantial removal counts that critics labeled “deporter-in-chief” numbers—figures cited in retrospectives and opinion pieces—as well as changes in counting that affect comparisons [8] [5]. More recently, debates over whether Biden “under-enforced” or merely refocused ICE have become politicized: some former Obama ICE officials praise Biden’s targeting of threats, while opponents argue Biden’s ICE removed fewer people relative to what critics call operational capacity—an argument that relies on contested interpretations of data and methodology [2] [4] [9]. Public claims about “cooked” numbers and the suspension of some DHS data releases have further complicated apples‑to‑apples comparison [5] [4].
6. Accountability, agency culture, and the limits of comparison
Former Obama-era ICE leadership publicly criticized the blunt deportation-focus of the Trump era and urged a return to threat‑based enforcement, signaling cultural and philosophical consistency between Obama and Biden approaches; at the same time, internal dissent within ICE over perceived swings in enforcement intensity has persisted across administrations [2] [4]. These sources document policy direction and dispute but do not comprehensively quantify day‑to‑day operational differences—detailed operational metrics and internal memos beyond those cited would be necessary to fully map procedural divergences [1] [4].
Conclusion: continuity with caveats
The best-supported conclusion in the record provided is that current (Biden-era) ICE procedures intentionally hew toward the Obama model on prioritization, prosecutorial discretion, and employer-focused worksite enforcement while adding oversight layers; political fights over removals, reporting, and the practical effects of these priorities mean public narratives about “more” or “less” enforcement often reflect partisan framing and contested data rather than simple procedural reversals [1] [3] [4]. Where sources are silent—on certain operational metrics and internal implementation gaps—no firm claim is made here.