ICE agents work to deport illegal immigrants with criminal records

An undocumented migrant waits in a holding facility in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Virginia on Jan. 15, 2025. As the only agency authorized to deport immigrants from the nation's interior, it can take numerous ICE agents, days or weeks of surveillance and considerable risk to arrest one person with an immigration violation and a criminal record. The agency has roughly 6,000 deportation agents. They're staring down a caseload of 7.6 million noncitizens Ð including more than 660,000 with criminal records or pending charges, according to ICE.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehend an undocumented migrant they were surveilling in Falls Church, Va. on Jan. 15, 2025. Congress pays for 41,500 immigration detention beds nationwide, and nearly all were filled at fiscal year's end.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fingerprints a migrant after he was apprehended in Virginia on Jan. 15, 2025. ICE makes two kinds of arrests: "at-large" in the community and "custodial" inside jails. ICE said it takes eight times the personnel to make an arrest in the community versus at a jail. The American Immigration Council estimates each at-large arrest costs taxpayers $6,653.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents search the vehicle of an undocumented migrant they apprehended in Falls Church, Va. on Jan. 15, 2025. For the past decade Ð dating back to the agency's creation after 9/11 Ð ICE has struggled to fulfill its mission of enforcing immigration laws in the country's interior, as the caseload and the demands on the agency have ballooned.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent slides a tray of food for a recently apprehended migrant through a reinforced door in an ICE field office in Virginia on Jan. 15, 2025. While Border Patrol is tasked with patrolling the northern and southern border regions, ICE focuses on arresting and deporting immigrants living across the United States. But repeated crises at the U.S.-Mexico border have led one administration after another to shift ICE agents and resources from interior enforcement to the border, an issue documented in every ICE annual report going back at least a decade.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents apprehend an undocumented migrant they were surveilling in Herndon, Va. on Jan. 15, 2025. The year 2012, under the Obama administration, saw the highest number of deportations from the interior, said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council. "Trump wasnÕt able to get close to that because of the large number of people presenting at the border."