Markwayne Mullin said ICE posted record annual enforcement totals in fiscal year 2026, with more than 491,000 immigration arrests and 483,200 deportations. DHS released the figures on Thursday after Donald Trump said in a 60 Minutes interview that the administration had been “too tough” in some cases.
The department said nearly 475,000 of the arrests were administrative arrests. That means the headline arrest total covered a broad mix of immigration enforcement cases, not only people accused of criminal conduct.
Markwayne Mullin and ICE
Mullin said, “Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE’s history.” He also said, “September 2026 was the best September in ICE’s history in terms of arrests.”
He added, “The total number of ICE arrests in Fiscal Year 2026 was more than all three full fiscal years under Biden combined, as the patriots of ICE work around the clock to make America safe again.” DHS said ICE reported more than 48,000 arrests and 44,000 removals in September 2026, the monthly pace that pushed the annual count to a new high.
Department of Homeland Security
DHS said the fiscal 2026 deportation total was about 18 percent higher than the 409,849 removals ICE recorded in fiscal 2012 and nearly 78 percent above the 271,484 removals recorded in fiscal 2024. The department also said ICE received an additional $75 billion over four years under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including $45 billion for detention expansion and nearly $30 billion for personnel and enforcement operations.
By the department’s count, more than 3 million migrants have left the U.S. since Trump returned to the White House. As of October, DHS said nearly 1.2 million people had been deported and more than 1.25 million had been arrested.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said comparisons of removals across administrations can be misleading because the Biden administration carried out more than 2 million expulsions under the Title 42 public health policy. Those expulsions were classified differently from removals, which complicates any straight line between one administration’s deportation totals and another’s.
The open question now is how many of the record arrests were tied to criminal charges and how many were administrative immigration violations, because DHS did not break that out in detail. A separate Mullins endorsement deal report shows how often the name appears in other contexts, but here the same surname points to the federal enforcement record that DHS placed at the center of its Thursday release.
