Trump deported fewer people last month than Biden a year ago, but border crossings have plummeted

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported fewer immigrants in February than they did under the Biden administration during the same month a year ago, according to ICE data obtained by NBC News that has not been previously reported. 

According to the data, ICE deported around 11,000 migrants last month, the first full month Trump was in office, compared to just over 12,000 in February 2024. One major reason for the higher numbers under the Biden administration was higher traffic from attempted border crossings, both legal and illegal, in 2024 compared to 2025. 

People who were first arrested by Customs and Border Protection, which typically means those arrested at the border, accounted for most of the deportations in February 2024 under Biden. It is easier to deport people detained near the border than to find them after they disperse across the U.S.

When removing recent border crossers from the total and counting only immigrants who were deported after first being arrested by ICE, nearly 4,300 immigrants were deported this February compared with roughly 2,100 in February 2024. 

The data obtained by NBC News is also an early indication of whether the second Trump administration is delivering on one of the main promises of its immigration crackdown, which President Donald Trump repeated in his inaugural address: “We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”

Border czar Tom Homan has consistently said the administration’s deportation policy is “worst first,” meaning it will prioritize removing people with criminal records or suspected national security threats. ICE told Congress last year that, as of July, it had identified 435,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions in the country who were not in custody.

Spokespeople for Customs and Border Protection, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, under which CBP and ICE fall, have not responded to questions about how many of those 435,000 people have been arrested by ICE or deported since Trump took office. The spokespeople also did not respond to questions from NBC News about the data on deportations last month.

Of the people deported in February, roughly half did not have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, the data showed. The number of immigrants without criminal records arrested by ICE and deported increased only slightly from the end of the Biden administration, from 223 in December to 390 in February, according to the data.

While the overall deportation number is lower than Biden’s, Trump’s immigration crackdown has been successful in other ways.

For example, the number of border crossers has dropped significantly.

Encounters along the border are the lowest they have been since tracking began 25 years ago. One reason is that the Trump administration ended the CBP One program that allowed migrants to book asylum appointments via a phone app while waiting at the border. Now, migrants are turned away at the border even if they approach legal ports of entry, a policy that immigration advocacy groups have opposed in court.

The Trump administration has been slow to reveal its deportation numbers, though it has publicized its arrest and detention figures, which are up compared to the Biden administration. In Trump’s first month in office, ICE arrested more than 20,000 immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security said, a 111 percent increase compared to the average monthly number of arrests during the last fiscal year.

And ICE under Trump is holding 10 percent more detainees than it was at the end of the Biden administration, according to the agency’s public data. At the end of February, ICE was holding almost 44,000 migrants in detention, according to the data. 

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Not every ICE arrest leads to an immediate deportation, or even necessarily to deportation at all.

 “Arrest is just the beginning, not the end,” explained former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser, who served under the Biden administration. “Every ICE removal requires a legal case, court rulings, potential arrest, detention space, transport logistics, diplomatic approvals and coordination across agencies.”

Some of those arrested by ICE, including during the Trump administration, are released into the U.S. on a monitoring program because there is not enough space in ICE detention. In the first two weeks of the Trump administration, ICE arrested over 8,000 immigrants and released 461, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in response to NBC News reporting. 

The Trump administration has pushed Congress for more money to increase detention space and ICE manpower. It is also using federal prisons and exploring using military bases as potential sites to expand detention, which could allow ICE to arrest, hold and deport more people.