WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security announced that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recorded its highest annual totals for both arrests and deportations in agency history during Fiscal Year 2026 (October 1, 2025–September 30, 2026). ICE reported more than 491,000 immigration arrests and 483,200 deportations.
The 483,200 deportations surpassed the previous ICE record of 442,640 set in FY2025 and were nearly 78% higher than the 271,484 recorded in FY2024, the last full fiscal year under the prior administration. According to DHS, the FY2026 total was roughly equivalent to the combined ICE deportations from FY2022–FY2024 (approximately 486,000) and more than eight times the roughly 59,000 deportations in FY2021.
Arrests followed a similar pattern. Nearly 475,000 of the FY2026 arrests were administrative (civil immigration violations rather than criminal charges). DHS stated that the overall arrest total exceeded the combined figure for FY2022–FY2024 (under 427,000) and was more than six times the roughly 74,000 arrests in FY2021. September 2026 alone saw more than 48,000 arrests and about 44,000 removals.
Monthly figures showed a sustained high pace. August 2026 set a single-month record with 50,925 arrests, topping July’s 50,208 and June’s 43,900.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin credited the results to administration policy changes that expanded ICE’s operational focus, saying the agency had been “unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens.” The department has also reported broader figures since the start of the current administration, stating that more than 3 million people have left the United States, with nearly 1.2 million deportations and over 1.25 million arrests as of October.
These ICE numbers reflect interior enforcement and do not include all Customs and Border Protection actions. According to CBS News, independent analyses have noted that overall (ICE + CBP) deportation levels in recent decades have at times been substantially higher; for example, total deportations reached roughly 1.86 million in FY2000. ICE’s own FY2012 total of about 409,849 removals was cited by DHS as a longstanding internal benchmark that FY2026 exceeded by about 18%.
According to Newsweek analyses of ICE administrative arrest data covering recent years have found that the share of arrestees with criminal convictions has declined under the current administration relative to some prior periods. One study of more than 1.6 million arrests from late 2015 through early 2026 reported that the criminal conviction rate among those arrested fell to about 34% during the early portion of the current term, compared with higher rates in earlier years (including roughly 66% in the final full year of the previous administration in one dataset). Previous ICE annual reports routinely included such breakdowns; the FY2026 release did not.
Border encounters have fallen sharply over the same period. Preliminary DHS data indicated nationwide encounters in FY2026 were at historically low levels relative to the peak years of 2022–2024, when annual encounters exceeded 2 million. This shift has corresponded with a greater share of enforcement activity occurring in the U.S. interior.
According to Migrationpolicy, the increase in ICE activity has also been enabled by significant additional funding for detention capacity, personnel, and operations enacted in 2025. Independent researchers have estimated that a substantial portion of recent deportations involved people with no criminal convictions, particularly among those with longer U.S. residence.
The figures released by DHS represent the agency’s official accounting of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations activity. Detailed demographic, criminal-history, and length-of-residence breakdowns for the full FY2026 totals have not yet been published in the same format used in prior years.
