Administration has blamed leakers for failed operations and claims numbers will ramp up as agents target wider categories of offenders. The White House disputed the report. “Hundreds of violent, predatory, and gang-affiliated criminal illegal aliens have already been rounded up and deported by ICE since President Trump took office — and the Trump administration is aligned on securing our borders and ensuring that mass deportations are conducted quickly and effectively to put Americans and America First,” it said in a statement.
![[Federal agents detain a man after conducting a raid at the Cedar Run apartment complex in Denver on February 5. While ICE has made thousands of arrests, Trump is still reportedly frustrated there aren’t more]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/02/08/15/14/2025-02-05T195931Z_432965043_RC2FOCAQWY1W_RTRMADP_3_USA-TRUMP-MIGRATION-AURORA.JPG)
According to publicly released figures, the agency’s highest single-day total was 1,100 arrests, though it regularly fails to crack 1,000. The first “high threat” deportees arrived this week for detention at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The administration has claimed multiple explanations for the slower-than-promised pace of immigration arrests. Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested earlier this week that leakers, protesters and sympathetic members of the press were spoiling the element of surprise for certain operations, after a mass Colorado raid intended to target over 100 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua attracted public attention and reportedly netted just 30 arrests, with a single confirmed gang member.
Horman said that the pace of arrests will ramp up once immigration officials work through the smaller number of high-threat individuals and expand to people accused of lower-level offenses. The new administration will be aided in its deportation push by the recent passage of the Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants accused but not yet convicted of lower-level offenses such as shoplifting.
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