by Frank Holmes, reporter
No issue shows what a night-and-day difference one election makes like illegal immigration.
President Donald Trump brought the border, which the Biden-Harris administration opened in a host of ways, back under operational control in a mere matter of days…and it’s doing much, much more.
When it comes to illegal immigration, the Trump administration has good news and better news—but, ironically, the “better news” also reveals how the bad old days of the Biden administration were worse than we knew.
The good news is the president’s tough border security policies have made a huge difference: Fewer illegal aliens crossed the U.S. southern border in February 2024 than in any month in the public record, which goes back a quarter of a century.
The better news is the Trump administration has made more arrests in its first 50 days than the Biden administration made all last year.
Since the president took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 32,809 enforcement arrests of illegal aliens, compared to 33,242 in fiscal year 2024, which ended last September 30.
These were, to use the president’s phrase, “bad hombres.” About half of the illegals that ICE arrested (14,111) were convicted criminals, a third (9,980) had pending criminal charges, and 39 were known or suspected terrorists.
As incredible as that is, the officials who compiled that data discovered another unreported Democratic scandal: Even the 2024 arrests on the record were a sham.
“We have uncovered that the previous administration…was cooking the books on ICE data,” Todd Lyons, President Trump’s acting ICE director, told reporters. “They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests.”
The Biden-Harris administration made only 113,431 immigration arrests during the last fiscal year, which ended at the end of last September…but they were imitation arrests.
After ICE performed “a comprehensive review” of the previous year’s arrest records, “we found tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities.”
The Democratic administration just carried out “pass-through arrests”: They formally placed the illegal border-crosser, coyote, or human trafficker under arrest…but then let the offender go, telling him to appear in court at a later date.
The Biden-Harris administration just expanded catch-and-release “arrests” by another name.
🚨🚨 NEW: Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons announced today that a review of ICE records found the Biden admin "cooked the books" and "purposely misled the American people" by falsely classifying illegal aliens who were processed by ICE & released into the US as ICE "arrests". pic.twitter.com/l16nOVozKY
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) March 13, 2025
The Democrats just engaged in “enforcement theater,” said Lyons—as phony as the fake Oval Office set the last administration made for Joe Biden.
“The Biden administration didn’t just cook the books, they cooked the whole library,” said Ari Fleischer, a former aide to President George W. Bush (who supported mass amnesty for illegal aliens and stimulating a huge influx of illegals during his eight years in office).
"The Biden Administration didn’t just cook the books, they cooked the whole library.”
The Biden Administration purposefully misled the American public by categorizing illegal aliens they released into the country as “arrests.”
Under @Sec_Noem, the days of immigration… pic.twitter.com/6qxiZZuRA4
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) March 13, 2025
This doesn’t exactly come as news to immigration experts, who tried to bring light to the Biden administration’s charade for four years.
The oustanding Center for Immigration Studies caught on to the problem the minute the Biden administration released its first tranche of data about fiscal year 2021, the Democrats’ first year in office.
“The Biden Administration Is Cooking The Books On Illegal Immigrant Arrests,” announced CIS in 2022. “The recently released report does not include the many charts and tables that make up the missing enforcement report, effectively preventing Congress, the media, and the public from analyzing the effects of the Biden administration’s controversial guidelines that have severely limited the ability of ICE officers to enforce immigration law. Instead, the report includes only a handful of numbers and percentages, and messaging that is difficult to verify.”
“Biden is cooking the books at the border,” wrote Chad Wolf, President Trump’s acting secretary of DHS in his first term and now executive director of the America First Initiative, in a Fox News editorial in 2023.
Others pointed out policies allegedly making illegal immigrants “legal residents” as another way Democrats tried to make the number of illegal crossings seem lower than it was. The Biden adminisration has just “taken 30,000 people and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to make your entry into the country legal, so by definition it’s no longer illegal immigration’ by a wave of the magic wand,” said RINO Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, in January 2023.
But Lyons’ comments are another reminder of the non-stop sham of the “Biden” administration, led by a mentally incompetent president and enforcing legislation signed by his autopen.
The second Trump administration is made up of real people—and their America First policies are delivering real results.