The Associated Press reported that President Donald Trump used his State of the Union address to highlight his administration’s immigration and border security record, emphasizing a decline in the number of migrants arrested while attempting to enter the United States along the southern border since he returned to office in January 2025.
In the Tuesday-night speech, Trump told lawmakers, “Today our border is secure,” and he added, “We now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far.” The AP also reported that Trump said, “In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.”
The AP said Trump’s remarks focused on the enforcement outcomes the administration has highlighted, while providing scant detail about what residents and critics say occurred during federal enforcement operations in other cities, including Minneapolis and Chicago. The AP reported that two U.S. citizens were shot and killed in Minneapolis in January and that protests followed, with residents and opponents raising concerns about federal officers’ tactics and how immigration enforcement officers were carrying out their mandate.
The AP outlined how key indicators changed after Trump’s return to office, contrasting the Biden-era enforcement landscape with developments during Trump’s second term. It said arrests of people attempting to enter the U.S. illegally peaked at nearly 250,000 in December 2023 under Biden, then declined through the rest of his term. The AP reported that in December 2024—the last full month before Trump was sworn in—arrests were a little over 46,000, and that by February 2025 arrests were less than 8,000; it said arrests were 6,070 in January.
The AP reported that ICE enforcement followed a different trend, after ICE promised a new era of enforcement that loosened restrictions on who could be arrested and removed. The AP said ICE recorded 8,507 arrests in December 2024, then said arrests climbed to 17,000 by February 2025, neared 30,000 by June, and reached 32,771 by September 2025, based on data the AP said came from the University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and was analyzed by AP. The AP said the last data release it cited came from mid-October, before the Minneapolis crackdown.
Alongside the increase in arrests, the AP reported growth in the number of people held in ICE detention facilities nationwide. The AP said the Department of Homeland Security received $45 billion to build, buy, or rent new facilities to house immigrants arrested and not yet deported. It also said ICE releases data every two weeks on the number of people in its facilities, and that the number fluctuates daily as people are brought in, released on bond—which the AP described as increasingly rare—or deported. The AP reported that detention averaged just under 40,000 people in December 2024 and that under Trump it reached 70,000 by February.
The AP also described federal immigration enforcement spending tied to detention and staffing. It said ICE received $45 billion in new money from Congress to step up immigration enforcement and border security and that it had been working to rent or buy more space to detain immigrants and to partner with conservative states to open facilities, including those promoted with names such as “Alligator Alcatraz” or “Speedway Slammer.” The AP reported that roughly $30 billion is going toward hiring 10,000 deportation officers, and that an additional $46 billion is for finishing the border wall Trump promised during his first term, alongside money for hiring more Customs and Border Protection officers and bolstering immigration courts.
On asylum, the AP reported that rejection outcomes also shifted under the Trump administration. It said the share of asylum applicants denied in court had ranged from a high of 60% to a low of 40% in the years before Trump’s first term and that denial rates then climbed every year that Trump was in office before falling again during the Biden administration. But the AP reported that asylum rejection rates jumped by 22.5% during the first year of Trump’s second term, based on data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The AP further reported that the administration has repeatedly portrayed mass deportation efforts as targeting people who have committed crimes or are a danger to society, using the phrase “the worst of the worst.” The AP said data from the Deportation Data Project shows the percentage of people arrested by ICE with criminal histories has been declining; it said that just before Trump took office, about 86% of ICE arrests involved people with criminal backgrounds, and that by mid-October about 55% had a criminal background while 45% did not. The AP also said critics point out that an arrest tied to a crime does not necessarily indicate a serious felony such as murder, and it reported that ICE enforcement can include “collateral arrests” when officers pursue a target.
The AP said that, historically, most people ICE arrested were transferred from state or local jails and prisons, but that under the Trump administration the agency has also used other tactics to bolster arrest numbers, including raiding worksites and targeting people as they arrive for immigration court dates or check-ins with the agency.