ICE Surpasses Border Patrol in Arrests as White House Demands More

More migrants are being arrested and detained within the United States than at the southwest border, but the White House reportedly wants even more to be held despite limited capacity in detention centers.

In a major shift for immigration enforcement, the latest detention data from ICE showed 11,367 of those booked into facilities in May were arrested by the agency, while 2,415 came from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

In May 2024, 20,131 arrivals were arrested by CBP, compared to 8,451 by ICE.

Both agencies operate under the Department of Homeland Security.

The shift in arrests comes amid an Axios report Wednesday that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is putting pressure on Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to triple the number of daily arrests made by her agents, including those working for ICE.

“I think it’s evident to everybody that the last administration’s policies they rolled back, on the first days in the office of the Biden administration was basically an unguarded, unprotected border. Everybody was given free rein to come here, it was just a mess,” Scott Mechkowski, a retired deputy field director with ICE, told Newsweek Wednesday. “I think President Trump’s administration, his policies, are effective and shut down the mass migration and it makes border enforcement more manageable now.”

Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment via email Wednesday morning.

Why It Matters

President Donald Trump ran an election campaign focused on illegal immigration and the promise of mass deportations – a policy spearheaded by Miller, who also drove the immigration agenda of the first Trump administration. ICE is already over its Congress-funded capacity and is in the process of seeking extra bed space and funding.

What To Know

The latest detention data from ICE, dated May 23, showed a notable switch from large numbers of custody book-ins from the border to those arrested by DHS agents within the U.S.

ICE enforcement, aided by other agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the FBI, ramped up in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration on January 20, while illegal border crossings continued to plummet.

Data from the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse (TRAC), which follows government data on immigration, showed Texas was holding the largest number of detainees in Fiscal Year 2025, which began in October 2024.

A total of 48,870 people were being held in ICE facilities across the country, but ICE is only funded by Congress for around 47,000 beds. The agency is looking for billions of dollars in extra funding through the GOP budget currently moving through the Capitol.

That will likely help Noem increase the number of arrests, which Miller is said to have demanded of her last week, according to Axios. He wants to see 3,000 arrests per day, roughly triple the number agents are making right now.

With detention capacity remaining an issue, it is not clear where extra detainees would stay, with the Trump administration reluctant to allow them to be released and electronically monitored in their communities, as previous administrations have done. There are already around seven million people on ICE’s non-detained docket.

What People Are Saying

Austin Kocher, immigration professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek: “It’s definitely the case that the Trump administration is seeing incredibly low numbers of people coming across the border and they are putting far more resources towards interior enforcement across the country. These two things combined means that people who are sitting in detention centers today mostly come from a result of ICE activity rather than border enforcement.”

Mechkowski, speaking to Newsweek about the GOP’s budget: “Congress, no doubt, has to have to give them the funding. I think that they need more funding for detention. That whole entire packet is going to cover a lot of stuff. I think I heard somebody say the other day that the amount of beds they’re asking for is like 100,000 or 150,000 beds. They are probably not going to get the funding for that. They should, but they probably won’t.”

What’s Next

ICE’s private prison partners GEO Group and CoreCivic have announced plans for expanded and new detention facilities, but DHS will need funding from Congress for extra agents to carry out enforcement. Those funds are currently appropriated in the House-passed budget bill, which is now being debated in the Senate.