More than 271,000 migrants have been deported from the US in 2024 — a paltry 9% of the 2.9 million encountered this year at the nation’s borders, according to new data.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saw its biggest tally of deportations the 2024 fiscal year since the Obama administration deported 316,000 undocumented migrants a decade ago, according to the annual report.
But immigration also had its biggest surge in US history under the Biden administration, surpassing even the Ellis Island era.
“Throughout the year, the agency was called on to do more without commensurate funding, working within the confines of strained resources and competing priorities while steadfastly supporting the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies in their efforts to secure the border,” said acting ICE Director Patrick Lechleitner in the yearly report.
Of those deported in 2024, nearly 89,000 faced criminal charges or convictions, according to ICE, with those arrested for homicide accounting for less than 1% of the arrests.
The latest figure, a 90% jump from deportation totals in 2023, also surpasses the highs of the Trump administration, where ICE reported 267,000 deportations in 2019.
ICE, which handles arrests and deportation, only removed 47,732 migrants in 2024, far below Trump’s 2019 number where nearly 86,000 migrants were apprehended inside the nation.
The Biden administration’s arrest numbers also represent a smaller percentage of his predecessor’s when compared to the sheer amount of people attempting to cross the border illegally.
The US began experiencing a massive surge in immigration starting in 2021 following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with CBP officers reporting nearly 2 million encounters that year.
Encounters spiked to more than 2.3 million in 2021, and 3.3 million in 2022 and back to 2.3 million in 2023, according to the CBP data.
The total encounters swung back up to 2.9 million this year, with 2.1 million being from the southern border, where hundreds of thousands are expected to try to cross illegally in hopes of entering the US before the start of President-elect Donald Trump’s term.
Trump could see his administration shatter Biden’s record as the president-elect has vowed to crack down on immigration and introduce mass deportations for those who entered the US illegally.
His incoming administration’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, has recently said he would need a minimum of 100,000 beds to detain undocumented immigrants at ICE detention centers to fulfill Trump’s plan.