ICE deported 483,200 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most in the agency’s history, the Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday. It also made more than 491,000 immigration arrests, nearly 475,000 of them administrative arrests, the highest total ever recorded.
For Black immigrants, the record lands on a system that was already weighted against them. An analysis by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, first reported by Capital B in 2025 and drawing on federal arrest and deportation records from the Obama, Trump and Biden years, found that Black migrants were 5.4% of the undocumented population but 20.3% of those facing removal over criminal convictions. The group’s policy director, Ronald Claude, called it “the enforcement Ferris wheel of ICE, CBP, police, you name it.” His point: a Black immigrant is exposed to deportation through the police stop as well as the immigration agent.
The new total beats the previous record, 442,640 in fiscal 2025, and is 78% above fiscal 2024, when ICE removed 271,484 people under President Biden. It is also well short of the one million a year the White House promised when Congress handed the agency billions of dollars.
The government’s own framing is that it is removing dangerous people. The numbers say otherwise. The Migration Policy Institute found that only about 20% of the roughly 980,000 deportations between January 2025 and July 2026 involved someone with a criminal conviction. A CBS News analysis found that in July, more than half of ICE arrests involved people with no convictions and no pending charges.
That matters for Black communities because the record is not only about people who were convicted of something. Capital B’s analysis of ICE data in December 2025 found arrests of African-born immigrants had more than doubled, with fewer than 40% of them having criminal records. Inside detention, Freedom for Immigrants has reported that Black migrants file 28% of abuse complaints while making up about 6% of the people held. Those are advocacy-group figures, and ICE has not accepted them, but no government agency publishes the same breakdown, which is part of the problem.
Even the president has flinched. Trump told “60 Minutes” that “I think it was too tough,” pointing to the deportation of longtime workers in landscaping and hospitality. CBS exit polling from the midterms found 58% of voters said enforcement had gone too far, against 22% who said it was about right.
Nothing in the White House’s plans suggests it is easing. Stephen Miller, the architect of the program, was just named chief of staff, and ICE is reportedly aiming for about 19,000 arrests a week.
A record built on people with no conviction, in a system that already deported Black immigrants at four times what their numbers would predict, is not public safety. It is volume. Congress, now with Democrats set to take the House, can demand what ICE has never released: removals and detention conditions by race and country of origin, so Black immigrants are counted before the next record is announced.
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