A record 51,000 migrants were arrested in July by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
To fulfill President Donald Trump’s massive deportation agenda, officers within the Department of Homeland Security have been pushed to reach high arrest quotas, with some reports stating as high as 3,000 per day.
A senior DHS official confirmed to The Independent that ICE made roughly 51,000 arrests in July, stating that the numbers beat June's record 43,000 arrests.
ICE was making an average of 1,645 daily arrests last month, multiple federal sources told Fox News, which first reported July’s record-breaking numbers.
“Every day, DHS is delivering on President Trump’s mandate from the American people to deport illegal aliens from our country,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement Friday.
“Just last week, ICE deported murderers, drug traffickers, and burglars. With deportations up, crime has gone down across the country. We will not stop deporting illegal aliens until we have made America safe again,” Mullin said.
But less than a third of migrants in detention as of early July have a criminal conviction, according to statistics reviewed by the nonprofit news site Stateline. The Independent has not verified the data.
Federal agents are specifically targeting people with expired visas at airports and using traffic stops, a couple of which have turned deadly, to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown.
An average of 20 to 40 migrants were arrested daily at airports in July, DHS told Stateline.
Federal agents have been making more arrests near gates and ticket counters at airports in San Francisco, Miami and Kansas City, Missouri, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
The Trump administration received fierce pushback last month after ICE agents fatally shot a 52-year-old Mexican man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston and a 25-year-old Colombian native, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Maine at traffic stops in less than a week.
DHS said an ICE officer fired his weapon at Guerrero because he feared for “public safety,” and Salgado Araujo was shot in “self-defense.”
Mullin ordered a pause in traffic stops after the deadly shooting, The Atlantic reported at the time. But Trump quickly reversed course.
“The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done,” the president wrote on Truth Social in mid July. “We must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
“Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch,” he said.
ICE’s record-breaking arrest numbers this summer follow a slowdown in the weeks and months after the two fatal shootings of 37-year-old U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January, according to the federal sources who spoke to Fox News.
A wave of protests followed the shootings, which the Trump administration claimed were in self-defense. The president’s border czar Tom Homan announced in February that hundreds of federal agents would be pulled from Minnesota amid public outcry.
Fox News’ sources said the record-breaking arrests are due to thousands of newly hired ICE agents and billions of dollars in new funding.
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