How do ICE interior removals under Biden compare to Obama and Trump when isolating interior (non‑border) deportations?
Executive summary
Interior (non‑border) removals fell sharply under Biden compared with earlier years, even as total deportations and returns rose due to border processing and expulsions; shifts in prosecutorial priorities and a pivot back toward border returns—rather than aggressive interior sweeps—largely explain the divergence [1] [2]. Comparisons with Trump and Obama hinge on definitions and data gaps: Obama-era guidance narrowed interior targets and reduced interior removals, Trump loosened priorities and increased community arrests, and Biden sits between those poles while presiding over many more border returns [3] [2] [4] [1].
1. Interior removals declined under Biden — numbers and context
ICE interior removals dropped substantially during the Biden presidency even as the administration presided over high overall removal totals driven by border returns and expulsions; Migration Policy reports that, for the first time since the early Obama years, most deportations were “returns” across the border rather than interior removals, and that in the year after Title 42 ended the U.S. removed or returned roughly 775,000 migrants—many via border processes rather than ICE interior actions [1].
2. Obama reduced interior removals by prioritizing who to target; Trump reversed that approach
Policy memos and analyses show Obama-era guidance (2010–2011 and reinforced in 2014) established prioritization categories that sharply reduced interior removals by steering ICE away from low‑level immigration violations and toward criminal aliens, a change that helped bring interior removals down from hundreds of thousands to far lower levels by FY2016 [3] [2]. By contrast, Trump’s interior enforcement orders explicitly loosened those constraints and enabled broader interior apprehensions, with reporting that his administration shifted tactics to more street-level tracking of immigrants rather than relying mainly on arrests at local jails [2] [4].
3. Biden’s pattern: fewer interior removals, more returns and border removals
Under Biden, the defining shift was operational: ICE carried out fewer interior removals while Customs and Border Protection and border processes (including negotiated returns and Title 8 removals after Title 42 ended) produced large totals of returns and removals at or immediately across the border, a pattern Migration Policy calls a return to an earlier era and credits with producing records in country-of-origin repatriations [1]. Fact‑checking and reporting concur that interior deportations fell while returns at the southern border climbed and the share of removals involving serious criminal convictions increased—changing the composition of who was formally deported [5] [6].
4. The criminality mix and competing narratives
How “enforcement” looks depends on whether analysis isolates interior removals and how it counts criminal convictions: some outlets find that under Trump a higher share of interior removals involved people with criminal histories, while Biden-era interior arrests and removals included a lower share of convicted criminals but far more border returns overall—meaning critics on both sides can cherry‑pick metrics to support “soft” or “tough” narratives [7] [6] [1]. Think tanks and advocacy groups also differ: TRAC and others document changes in daily averages and removals per day that complicate headline comparisons, and commentators warn about “cooking the books” when border encounters are folded into removal totals [8] [7].
5. Data gaps, definitions and why definitive ranking is elusive
A meaningful apples‑to‑apples ranking requires clean interior‑only time series, consistent inclusion rules for returns vs removals, and public ICE data for all periods—something the record does not fully provide, especially across administrations and into subsequent years when data collection or publication practices shifted [5] [8]. Reporting repeatedly flags that monthly breakdowns and interior‑only tallies are uneven or missing for some administrations, that Title 42 expulsions are excluded from formal removals datasets, and that administrations can change enforcement priorities and tactics in ways that alter comparability [1] [5] [8].
6. Bottom line — comparison distilled
When isolating interior, non‑border deportations, Biden presided over materially fewer ICE interior removals than the peaks seen under prior policy regimes that prioritized interior enforcement; Obama’s prioritization reduced interior removals, Trump loosened limits and increased interior community arrests, and Biden reduced interior removals further while shifting enforcement emphasis to border returns and diplomatic repatriations—though exact rankings depend on which metrics and time windows are chosen and on incomplete public data [3] [2] [4] [1] [8].