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By Billal Rahman
Immigration Reporter
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Less than a week after President Donald Trump called his administration's own immigration enforcement police "too tough," Homeland Security's latest news release touted a record-breaking year for immigration arrests for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE deported 483,200 people and made more than 491,000 immigration arrests in fiscal year 2026, the highest annual totals in the agency’s history, according to figures the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released Thursday.
The number of deportations surpassed the previous record of 442,640 set in fiscal 2025. DHS said nearly 475,000 of the arrests in fiscal 2026 were administrative arrests, which involve alleged civil immigration violations rather than criminal charges.
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The figures mark a significant expansion of immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump, whose administration has made mass deportations a central policy priority.
ICE reported more than 48,000 arrests and 44,000 removals in September alone, according to DHS.
“Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE’s history," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a press release on Thursday. "September 2026 was the best September in ICE’s history in terms of arrests. The total number of ICE arrests in Fiscal Year 2026 was more than all three full fiscal years under Biden combined, as the patriots of ICE work around the clock to make America safe again. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives.”
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said in a post on X that while ICE had broken arrest records, comparisons of removals across administrations could be misleading because the Joe Biden administration also carried out more than 2 million expulsions under the Title 42 public health policy. Those repatriations were classified as expulsions rather than removals and therefore are not reflected in DHS's removal figures, he said.
ICE's enforcement operations were supercharged by billions of dollars in funding under President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which provided the agency an additional $75 billion over four years. Of that, $45 billion was allocated to expand immigration detention and nearly $30 billion to personnel and enforcement operations, including arrests and deportations.
The fiscal 2026 deportation total was about 18 percent higher than the 409,849 removals ICE recorded in fiscal 2012 during the Obama administration and nearly 78 percent above the 271,484 recorded in fiscal 2024, the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, DHS said.
Since Trump stormed back to the White House, more than 3 million migrants have left the U.S., according to DHS figures. The agency said that, as of October, nearly 1.2 million people had been deported and more than 1.25 million arrested.
Newsweek has not independently verified the figures provided by the agency.
The record figures come as President Donald Trump has acknowledged that his administration's immigration crackdown may have gone too far. Following Republican losses in the midterm elections, Trump said in a 60 Minutes interview that the administration had been "too tough" in some cases, pointing to immigrants working in industries such as landscaping and hospitality who had been removed despite holding jobs and paying taxes.
ICE has also faced mounting scrutiny, backlash, and public revulsion over a slate of shootings involving its officers, allegations of racial profiling and other misconduct, aggressive enforcement tactics, and inadequate medical care for detainees as the administration has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement nationwide.
Internal agency records obtained by Newsweek showed 148 open allegations of misconduct and potential criminal wrongdoing from fiscal years 2023 through 2025, including allegations of sexual assault, bribery, drug smuggling, domestic violence, and drunken driving.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton, Gray R. Thomas
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