How have ICE arrest priorities changed under different presidential administrations?
Executive summary
ICE arrest priorities shift markedly with each administration’s directives and resource choices: Republican administrations in the Trump eras pushed broader interior enforcement and higher arrest targets, while the Biden administration deprioritized noncriminal immigration violations in favor of public-safety cases [1] [2]. Recent reporting shows a sharp surge in interior arrests, a growing share of people without criminal records among those arrested, and new operational tools—hiring surges, interagency tasking, and a media push—that together have altered how and whom ICE arrests [3] [4] [5].
1. Historical baseline: statutory powers stay constant, priorities change
The legal authority for ICE to arrest and detain noncitizens has been largely stable across administrations under federal statutes such as 8 U.S.C. §§ 1226 and 1357, meaning the executive branch changes the agency’s focus without changing the underlying arrest powers [6]. That statutory constancy makes any shift in “priorities” an operational and political decision—who agents target and where resources are deployed—rather than a change in legal authority [6].
2. Trump’s first term: broadening interior enforcement and rapid arrest increases
The first Trump administration moved quickly to widen interior arrests and rejected prior informal exemptions, reporting tens of thousands of administrative arrests in the early months and explicitly removing categories of noncitizens from de‑facto safe harbor [1]. Public records and contemporaneous ICE statements from 2017 show a marked increase in ERO arrests compared with the year before, illustrating how executive directives can drive rapid changes in arrest volume [1].
3. Biden-era reprioritization: focusing on public-safety cases
Multiple outlets and analyses indicate that under President Biden, ICE de‑emphasized arrests of people with no additional criminal charges and prioritized removal of those who posed public‑safety or national‑security risks, resulting in lower interior arrest rates for noncriminal immigration violations relative to subsequent surges [2]. Commentators and data compilations contrast the Biden approach of prioritizing serious criminals with later administrations that widened the net [2].
4. Trump 2.0 and the 2025–26 acceleration: quotas, hires and a media operation
In the most recent Trump term, the administration set aggressive enforcement goals, pushed higher daily arrest targets and greatly expanded ICE’s workforce—moves documented in reporting about quotas, hiring surges and explicit political pressure to increase numbers [7] [5]. ICE arrest counts rose from roughly 300 per day to more than 800 per day in recent analyses, and some reports say field offices were instructed to meet high daily arrest quotas [3] [7].
5. Targets shifted toward immigration-only cases; public and local impacts
Data- and investigative reporting find an increasing share of ICE arrests are of people without criminal convictions — analyses show the noncriminal share rising and months with tens of thousands of interior arrests, concentrated in cooperating jurisdictions and often made from local jails [4] [8]. Those operational choices have produced public resistance, protests, and confrontations in communities where arrests increasingly take place in public settings [9] [10].
6. Tools, messaging and contested narratives: who benefits from the framing?
Beyond manpower, the recent enforcement surge has been accompanied by a coordinated media push to dramatize arrests and brand targets as the “worst of the worst,” even as immigration‑advocacy groups and legal groups dispute the criminality of many arrested people and warn of due‑process bypasses such as expedited removals [3] [11]. Critics — including legal advocates and some Democratic lawmakers — argue the enforcement diversion has affected other law‑enforcement priorities and may be politically motivated; DHS and administration spokespeople counter that criminal enforcement and human‑smuggling investigations remain central [12] [11].
7. Limits of reporting and implications for accountability
Available sources document clear operational shifts — arrests, quotas, hiring and media strategies — but granular national comparisons over long timescales, the exact breakdown of convictions among all arrestees, and internal decision memos remain partially opaque in public reporting, constraining definitive attribution of every outcome to a single policy choice [3] [4]. What is clear from the reporting is that priority changes come from the White House and DHS directives, that those shifts can rapidly change arrest profiles on the ground, and that they carry legal, political and community consequences that will continue to be litigated and debated [6] [10].