U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement reported 2,200 arrests Tuesday, ramping up enforcement efforts after the Trump administration called for 3,000 daily arrests last week.
The new arrest numbers mark a 37% jump from the 1,600 daily arrests last week, sources told The New York Post.
“We’re paying the price for the last administration’s open borders policy,” a source told The Post.
The increased enforcement comes after Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem put pressure on ICE leadership to make 3,000 arrests per day at a May 21 meeting.
Miller confirmed the new quota during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week.
“And President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day, so we can get all of the Biden illegals that were flooded into our country for four years out of our country,” Miller told Hannity.
In the first 100 days of Trump’s administration, federal immigration agents arrested 66,463 migrants without legal status and removed 65,682 individuals, according to ICE.
Border Czar Tom Homan said ICE was initially going after the “worst of the worst,” including criminals, gang members and public safety threats. But now ICE agents are making arrests during traffic stops, at courthouses and scheduled immigration appointments.
ICE has reported apprehensions across the country, including a Tuesday news release announcing ICE Houston has deported 142 criminal illegal immigrants to Mexico in the past two weeks.
As a group, the illegal immigrants have been convicted of 473 crimes and illegally entered the U.S. 480 times. The group included eight gang members, 11 convicted child predators and a criminal who illegally entered US 21 times.
“Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly,” said ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford in the release. “For the past few years, there was virtually no deterrent to illegally entering the country. As a result, millions of illegal aliens poured into the country including violent criminal aliens, child predators, transnational gang members and foreign fugitives.”
On Monday, federal officials announced 1,500 illegal immigrants — more than half with criminal records — were arrested in Massachusetts during the month of May as a part of Operation Patriot.
Massachusetts’s Gov. Maura Healey put out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants and protected them with sanctuary policies. Taxpayers have spent over $1 billion on emergency shelters for migrants, including those who entered the country illegally and those under the Biden administration’s parole programs.
Independent journalist and YouTuber Nate Friedman released a new video Wednesday on the shelters, speaking with a former director who quit due to the fraud and crime occurring at the shelter.
Friedman immediately had the police called on him for “trespassing” after trying to inquire about a shelter in Marlborough, Mass., which made national news after a man living in the shelter was charged with aggravated rape of a child for allegedly raping his teen daughter and impregnating her.
Jon Fetherston, the former shelter director, told Friedman: “I believe Maura Healey should be prosecuted. I believe Maura Healey should go to jail for the rest of her life for the crimes that she’s committed.”
Amid growing resistance and anti-ICE rhetoric, federal agents have started covering their faces to protect their identity — something ICE’s Acting Director Todd Lyons isn’t apologizing for.
At the end of Monday’s press conference in Boston, announcing the Operation Patriot effort in Massachusetts, Lyons, a native of South Boston and a graduate of Boston College High School in Dorchester, walked back to the podium.
Federal officers have been “doxed” on social media and their families have received death threats, Lyons said.
“People are out there taking photos of the names, their faces and posting them online with death threats to their family and themselves,” Lyons told reporters, per local station Boston 25 News.
“So, I’m sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I’m not gonna let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line and their family on the line because people don’t like what immigration enforcement is,” Lyons said.
Meanwhile, national and local Democratic leaders and activists, who forced masks during COVID and cover their faces at protests, have taken to social media and other outlets to criticize ICE agents. They compare the masked immigration agents to figures from repressive fascist and communist regimes of the past.
