Trump vs. Obama: ICE Enforcement By Numbers

Adriana Stone 0 1 min read

Trump vs. Obama: ICE Enforcement By Numbers

People are arguing loud about ICE. Some say it’s new. It isn’t. ICE has been around for decades.

Numbers cut through a lot of emotion. They don’t tell the whole story. But they do show trends.

According to press reporting, from President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration through the end of November, his administration made about 595,000 arrests and reported roughly 605,000 deportations. Those are big totals.

Independent outlets flagged incidents where U.S. citizens were detained. One report counted 170 such detentions in a set of cases. Many involved arrests for interfering with or assaulting officers. Only about 40 of those detainees later said they were U.S. citizens and were held longer than a day. That works out to an estimated error rate of about 0.0067% — roughly one wrongful detention per 14,925 arrests.

Now compare that to the final two years of the Obama administration. In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (book-ins), and four mistaken removals, across about 239,645 arrests. The detention-only error rate for that period was about 0.0225% — roughly one mistake per 4,444 arrests. Put another way, the reported overall error rate in that window was several times higher than the recent figure attributed to the Trump administration.

Numbers like these explain why many people accuse the media and opponents of a double standard. They point out that similar enforcement under Obama drew less protest. They also note how leaders and officials were treated differently in public discourse.

That doesn’t mean mistakes aren’t serious. Every wrongful detention matters. But if your focus is on comparative performance, the headline numbers matter. Arrest totals, deportations, and measured errors paint a different picture than some of the rhetoric suggests.

Public debate will keep rolling. Facts help frame it. So do questions about policy choices, oversight, and how to reduce errors going forward.

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