After 100 ICE agents spent five hours on the ground looking for criminal migrants in Chicago last week, only two people were arrested, the New York Post reported.
In Denver and Aurora, Colorado, which President Donald Trump decried as the epicenter of migrant violence tied to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, an eye-popping 400 ICE agents were dispatched Wednesday. By the day’s end—and after knocking on hundreds of doors, including those of U.S. citizens—only one Tren de Aragua member was taken into custody, sources told ABC News.
That lone arrest is a far cry from the 100-plus gang members ICE hoped to nab—success the agency has enjoyed in certain raids, like in New York. Border czar Tom Homan suggested the Colorado raid flopped because the gang had been tipped off by local media coverage.
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But it’s that coverage, and a broader “PR blitz,” that appears to be propping up the first weeks of Trump’s migration crackdown. Trump’s team has flooded the zone with much-hyped arrest figures posted to X and turned ICE raids into a spectacle—complete with celebrity embeds like Dr. Phil and “ICE Barbie” Nancy Mace tagging along.
“Much of this is optics and not reality,” immigration attorney Elizabeth Ricci, who has represented migrants in every administration since George H. W. Bush, told the Daily Beast this week.
Ricci has noticed a higher presence of ICE agents at colleges in Florida, where she is an immigration law professor at Florida State University. (She has also heard a rumor that local ICE offices are being mandated to make 75 arrests a day.) But while there is intense urgency from the White House, it has yet to translate into a spike in arrests or removals—at least not that Ricci has witnessed.
“The number of calls I am getting is more or less the same as they were this time last year,” she said.
Trump and other officials, like homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, said their initial arrests would target criminal migrants.
With migrants committing crimes at significantly lower rates than U.S. citizens, however, and with criminal removals already being a priority under Joe Biden, it appears that well may be running dry for Team Trump—perhaps evidenced by some of the Trump era’s high-profile raids falling flat.
ICE appears to be blurring the lines of reality itself. On Thursday, The Guardian revealed the agency inflated its presence on Google by quietly updating its press release archives, causing years-old (and, in some cases, decades-old) releases about arrests to appear on Google as if they took place in recent days.
The agency has also kept removal numbers under wraps, ignoring multiple requests from the Daily Beast—and other media outlets—for figures. Ricci noted ICE has also removed data from its website, which used to provide additional insight into removal totals.
The Department of Homeland Security finally gave a glimpse into Trump’s removals on Tuesday, saying 5,700 migrants had been repatriated since Jan. 20. At that rate, Trump would be on track to deport half the number of migrants that Biden did in 2024, which was 271,484.
John Sandweg, acting director of ICE from 2013 to 2014, told Politico it “makes sense politically” for the White House to spin its immigration numbers.
Trump has touted his immigration crackdown on Truth Social, but the numbers do not always add up. He shared a graphic last week that suggested agents conducted a negative number of migrant encounters at the southern border on certain days, which is not possible.
While Trump’s removal and arrest numbers aren’t record-breaking—at least not yet—the president has still made a swath of changes that have immigrant communities on edge.
That includes using Guantanamo Bay as a migrant detention facility, and floating the possibility of foreign nationals being held in El Salvador—even if they are not from the Central American nation.
Space will be needed if Trump wants to deliver on his promise to deport millions. The White House said Wednesday it had been forced to release more than 400 migrants due to a lack of detention center capacity.
There are also growing fears that migrants without criminal records may soon be subject to arrest and removal to keep ICE figures high (and Trump happy).
Héctor Quiroga, an immigration attorney in Houston, has already seen some evidence of this.
“I have observed a significant rise in the detention of individuals without criminal records,” he told the Daily Beast on Friday. “Even more concerning, some detainees have been denied immediate access to legal counsel, a clear violation of their rights.”
Quiroga noted that ICE does not need to give advance notice to carry out a raid. This makes them “highly unpredictable,” and could lead to a migrant being arrested, even without a criminal record.
At the end of the day, though, some immigration experts know that, with Trump, winning on immigration means winning on optics.
“These people never stop campaigning, and Trump and his team—look, they’re much savvier, they’re hungrier and unrelenting,” Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of Immigration Hub, told Politico. “And part of it is doing what Trump does best, which is entertainment and cruelty.”
