DHS claimed this week that New York has refused to honor more than 16,000 ICE detainers asking the Empire State to turn criminal aliens in its custody over to the agency for removal since the start of the second Trump administration. Tune out claims that Trump II is snatching up “otherwise law-abiding” aliens: the logical reason for this “sanctuary” intransigence is that, traditionally, the vast majority of ICE interior arrests have been “custodial” ones, from jails, detention facilities, and prisons — except, ironically, under the Biden administration. So, New York politicos who don’t think anyone should be deported, even public safety threats, are keeping ICE officers out of their prisons and jails. Here are the facts.

'Interior Arrests'

As I’ve explained in the past, two key metrics define DHS’s effectiveness in reducing the unauthorized alien population: ICE arrests of removable aliens living here (“interior arrests”); and its deportations of aliens found in the interior of the United States (as opposed to illegal migrants apprehended by CBP at the border), known as “interior removals”.

Why are those the “key” metrics? Because border enforcement is reactive, driven by migrants trying to enter illegally, but immigration enforcement in the interior is proactive — it represents how effective immigration officers in ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate have been in arresting and deporting removable aliens who are already here.

While ICE has claimed its officers broke all-time monthly interior arrest records in July (50,208) and again in August (50,925), both it and DHS have — to my frustration — failed to produce hard statistics that can be analyzed to both confirm and analyze those claims.

For the time being, I’ll accept ICE’s claims at face value, while still adhering to what President Reagan insisted was an old Russian proverb: doveryai, no proveryai, “trust, but verify”.