Just 142,000 ICE deportations in 2023 despite 3.2 million border encounters — 49% had criminal histories

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement released statistics for 2023 that showed a small percentage of illegal immigrants were deported, a number that makes up less than 5% of encounters with immigration agents.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, Border Patrol had more than 2 million encounters, while field operatives came into contact with another million people. This totaled over 3.2 million encounters with illegal immigrants in the United States and on its borders.

With ICE's latest statistics, it has been revealed that 142,580 noncitizens were deported. That is a 4.4% deportation rate in relation to border encounters.

Of these deportees, nearly half (49%) had criminal histories, with an average of 3.8 convictions per criminal. Crimes included 1,457 charges of homicide, 1,450 kidnappings, 3,809 sexual assaults, 26,714 assaults, 2,760 robberies, 5,410 burglaries, and 6,114 weapon offenses.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently stated that the administration has actually deported a "record number" of individuals.

"Customs and Border Protection sources say that currently, they are releasing more than 70% of the migrants crossing every day and sometimes more than that number. Would that surprise you?" Fox News' Bret Baier asked Mayorkas.

"It would not. It would not surprise me at all," Mayorkas replied, according to the New York Post.

"I know the data. And I will tell you that when individuals are released they are released into immigration enforcement proceedings." Mayorkas then added that a "record number" of migrants were "returned or removed" in 2023.

Perhaps the secretary was referring to a "record" for the Biden administration, as the deportations for fiscal year 2023 were by far the most under the 46th president, nearly doubling the 72,177 deportations from 2022. In 2021, there were 59,011 deportations.

However, with a total of 273,768 deportations in the first three years of his presidency, Biden's numbers are less than two and a half times that of President Trump's final three years.

Trump deported 709,227 illegal residents from from 2018 to 2020.

Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, told Breitbart that she refuted Secretary Mayorkas’ claim.

"Alejandro Mayorkas can’t play it both ways," Ries said. "He’s already publicly admitted that they’ve released at least 70% of the 10+ million illegal aliens encountered by Customs and Border Protection in the past three years."

"He can’t then go portray himself as a secretary of immigration enforcement based on deportations, especially when you examine the numbers to scale," Ries added. "The American people stopped believing his lies long ago."

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