Immigration and Customs Enforcement has now removed 356,389 people from the United States so far in fiscal year 2026, according to data the agency posted this week. That number alone tells a story of an administration finally serious about enforcing the immigration laws already on the books, rather than treating them as optional suggestions.
The fiscal year began October 1, and the latest figures cover removals through mid July, meaning there are still more than two months left before the fiscal year closes out on September 30. At the current pace, ICE is on track to significantly exceed the total for all of fiscal year 2025, which ended with 319,980 removals. That means this year’s total has already surpassed last year’s full year number with weeks still to go.
To put the daily pace in perspective, 356,389 removals over roughly nine and a half months works out to approximately 1,260 deportations every single day. That is not a symbolic crackdown limited to press conferences and photo ops. That is sustained, methodical enforcement happening around the clock, week after week, month after month.
June proved to be a particularly aggressive month for the agency. According to the data, ICE and Customs and Border Protection combined recorded just over 43,000 arrests during June, the highest monthly total of the fiscal year. Border czar Tom Homan had already signaled that June would be a record setting month for enforcement activity, and the newly released numbers confirm he was right.
What makes this year’s pace especially significant is the historical comparison. Mike Howell, who leads the Trump aligned Oversight Project, noted that this year’s removals are on track to exceed the total set by the Obama administration back in fiscal year 2013, when 438,421 people were deported. If ICE maintains its current daily average through the end of September, it will comfortably clear that mark and set a new modern era record for annual removals.
Howell was careful to add some important context, though, and it is worth including here rather than pretending the picture is entirely rosy. He pointed out that while this year’s numbers beat the Obama era record in raw totals, they represent a smaller share of the total illegal population currently living in the country, since that population has grown substantially over the past several years. His point was not that the administration is failing, but that there is still considerable ground to cover if the goal is truly mass deportation on the scale originally promised.
Still, the scale of the increase compared to recent years cannot be overstated. Through the first six months of this fiscal year alone, ICE had already carried out 234,236 removals, compared to just 134,500 at the same point in fiscal year 2025 and 133,803 at the same point in fiscal year 2024. That represents roughly a 74 percent increase over the same stretch in either of the two prior years, a dramatic acceleration by any measure.
Detention numbers tell a similarly serious story. ICE currently has 65,765 individuals in its detention facilities nationwide. Of those, roughly 60 percent, or about 39,576 people, have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. That statistic alone should put to rest the narrative pushed by open borders advocates that ICE is simply rounding up otherwise law abiding people with no criminal history. The majority of those currently in detention have a documented criminal background.
This surge in enforcement did not happen by accident. It followed a significant increase in federal funding and infrastructure dedicated to immigration enforcement. ICE’s detention budget received a substantial boost, expanding projected daily bed capacity to well over 100,000 and increasing agency personnel to roughly 21,000 employees, including thousands of dedicated deportation officers brought on specifically to carry out this expanded mission.
The agency has also leaned heavily on partnerships with local and state law enforcement to extend its reach. A record number of new 287(g) agreements, which allow local police departments to assist with federal immigration enforcement, were signed as part of this broader push. Decentralizing enforcement this way has allowed ICE to multiply its effective presence across the country far beyond what its own agents alone could accomplish.
Worksite enforcement has also ramped up considerably compared to the largely hands off approach of the previous administration. Employers who knowingly hire illegal labor have faced a wave of new arrests tied directly to workplace raids, along with proposed fines exceeding a million dollars against businesses found to be non compliant with federal hiring laws. That kind of enforcement sends a message not just to illegal immigrants but to the American employers who have profited from looking the other way.
It is worth remembering just how different this looks from where things stood only a few years ago. Under the Biden administration, deportations initially lagged well behind historical norms before eventually rising due to record numbers of border crossings rather than any deliberate interior enforcement strategy. Officials at the time were explicit that being in the country illegally would not, by itself, be treated as grounds for removal, a policy that effectively told millions of illegal immigrants they had little to fear from ICE as long as they avoided serious criminal charges.
That policy produced predictable results. Interior enforcement all but collapsed, with only a small fraction of non criminal removals actually coming from the interior of the country rather than the border itself. Sanctuary cities across the nation used that posture as cover to further restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities, creating a patchwork of jurisdictions where illegal immigrants faced essentially no risk of removal regardless of their conduct.
The current numbers represent a decisive break from that approach. This administration has made clear that being in the country illegally is, in fact, grounds for removal, full stop, and the removal statistics reflect that shift in priorities. Interior enforcement has surged alongside border enforcement, closing off the safe harbor that sanctuary jurisdictions had effectively created for years.
Critics on the left have predictably characterized this surge as cruel or excessive, but the numbers themselves tell a more measured story than that framing suggests. With 60 percent of those in detention carrying criminal convictions or pending charges, the enforcement effort continues to prioritize public safety threats even as it dramatically expands its overall scope. This is not indiscriminate sweeping. It is targeted, resourced, and sustained enforcement of laws that were simply not being enforced for years.
There is also a broader deterrent effect worth considering. As word spreads that ICE is actually removing hundreds of thousands of people annually rather than simply detaining and releasing them pending court dates years down the line, the calculus for would be illegal border crossers shifts. Enforcement that is credible and consistent tends to reduce the incentive to attempt illegal entry in the first place, something border security experts have long argued is essential to getting a handle on the broader migration crisis.
None of this means the job is finished. As Howell noted, even a record breaking year of 450,000 or more removals would still represent a small fraction of the estimated illegal population currently residing in the country, a population that by some estimates runs into the tens of millions. Getting enforcement numbers to a level that meaningfully shrinks that population over time will require sustained commitment well beyond a single record-breaking fiscal year.
Worksite enforcement, in particular, remains an area where further escalation could make a meaningful difference, since illegal labor markets continue to provide the economic incentive drawing migrants across the border in the first place. Analysts following the data closely have suggested that unless worksite enforcement becomes a more central pillar of the strategy going forward, overall removal numbers may plateau even as arrest totals continue climbing.
