Is what is happening with ICE now more or less than previous presidencies?
Executive summary
ICE activity and footprint today is larger in budget, visibility, and aggressive operations than in many prior presidencies, driven most recently by a second Trump administration that expanded staffing and funding and deployed agents for high-profile domestic operations; however measures such as encounters, expulsions, and removals have fluctuated across administrations (not simply rising monotonically), with important caveats around counting methods and pandemic-era Title 42 policies that complicate direct comparisons [1] [2] [3].
1. The headline: bigger agency, bigger budget, bigger visibility
Since returning to the White House, President Trump has prioritized enlarging ICE’s role, increasing staffing and pouring appropriations into the agency so that ICE is now being described as the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency — a change that has translated into thousands of agents operating in U.S. cities and high-profile public arrests and clashes with protesters [1] [2] [4].
2. Arrests, detainers and removals: the numbers don’t tell a simple story
Arrest and removal statistics vary by metric and administration: removals rose across the Bush and Obama years until COVID-19 and then shifted with Title 42 expulsions under Biden, while detainer use spiked under Trump’s first term and remained significant thereafter — in short, Trump-era policy produced sharp rises in some enforcement tools (detainers, arrests in certain years), Biden-era policies produced large numbers of border “encounters” and expulsions tied to Title 42, and raw comparisons require attention to what each number actually measures (removals vs. encounters vs. detainers) [3] [5] [6] [2].
3. Policy levers matter: executive orders, Title 42 and counting rules
The scale and character of ICE’s activity respond directly to presidential directives and legal authorities: Trump’s executive orders in 2017 and later directives expanded who was prioritized for enforcement, while Biden-era use of Title 42 during the pandemic produced automatic expulsions that raised enforcement returns in 2020–23; additionally, changes in how deportations and removals are counted since the Bush era have complicated longitudinal comparisons across presidencies [1] [3] [6].
4. Tactics and controversies: public perception and allegations of excess
Under Trump’s more recent term ICE has been accused of more aggressive public tactics — arrests in public settings, partnering with other federal officers, and clashes that sometimes involved force — prompting protests and renewed calls for reform or abolition; reporting and watchdog groups have documented incidents that critics say reflect mission creep and politicized targeting, while defenders point to priority shifts toward individuals with criminal histories [4] [2] [7].
5. Who benefits from the narrative — and why this matters
Political actors on both sides have incentives to emphasize particular metrics: administrations tout removals and criminal-targeting to justify expansion, opponents highlight detainer spikes, public arrests, and fatalities to argue for limits or abolition; news outlets and unions also shape the story — for example, union endorsements and think-tank analyses are cited on opposite sides of the debate — meaning any comparison must be read through political and institutional lenses [8] [7] [9].
6. Bottom line and limits of the available reporting
Measured by budget, staffing and visibility of domestic operations, ICE today is larger and more activated than in many prior presidencies, especially compared with the late Obama years; measured by specific numerical outcomes — arrests, detainers, removals, or encounters — the picture is mixed and depends on definitions, temporary pandemic policies like Title 42, and administration-specific priorities, and the public data sets begin at different times or are counted differently, limiting perfect apples-to-apples comparisons [2] [5] [3] [6]. Sources consulted do not provide a single unified time-series that neutralizes counting changes across all presidencies, so definitive numerical ranking beyond the clear growth in funding and operational deployment under the current administration is not supported by the available documents [6] [1].