On March 11th this year, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released the agency’s “Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report”, detailing data on ICE’s broad responsibilities, including fighting terrorism; against proliferation; anti-narcotics; investigation of crimes ranging from customs fraud to human trafficking and child exploitation; and enforcement of the country's immigration laws. “The report underscores the significant new actions taken by ICE to focus enforcement priorities on threats to national security, public safety, and border security”, according to the agency's official website.

Report data demonstrates that under the Biden administration, deportations in the country dropped sharply last year to the lowest levels in the agency's history, despite recent records in the number of crossings at the country's border.

During the 2021 fiscal year ending September 30th, ICE recorded 59,011 deportations, down from 185,884 in 2020. The lower numbers were, in part, a result of changes in enforcement triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Public Health Code Title 42, allowed US agents to quickly expel illegal cross-border people, as under the new code, this procedure becomes not set up as formal deportation.

Regarding immigrant arrests in the interior of the country, another indicator of ICE inspection activity, also showed a significant drop relates to historical averages. “Officers working for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) made about 74,082 administrative arrests during the 2021 fiscal year, down from 104,000 during fiscal 2020 and an average of 148,000 annually from 2017 through 2019”, according to The Washington Post publication.

The numbers are justified by the Biden administration because of efforts to prioritize the emphasis on “quality over quantity”, whose orientation is to prioritize the enforcement of immigrants who pose threats to public and national security. According to ICE, the new report was intended precisely to discuss the main political and operational changes based on this new orientation. Thus, the numbers would show “ICE’s renewed focus of its civil immigration enforcement efforts on the most pressing threats to national security, public safety, and border security, while empowering career law enforcement officials in the field to make discretionary decisions about which noncitizens to arrest, detain, and remove based on the totality of the facts and circumstances in each case”.

The ICE report further points out that it detained 12,025 individuals in 2021 from aggravated criminal convictions, nearly double the 2020 total. The agency highlighted a targeted operation that arrested 495 “non-citizen sex offenders” from 54 different countries, more than the double the number of detainees in 2020.

The number of deportations recorded last year (59,011) was the lowest since 1995, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics. According to the publication of the journal, “Biden campaigned for president promising a break with his predecessor’s aggressive enforcement approach and unabashed enthusiasm for mass immigration arrests. After taking office, Biden ordered a “pause” on deportations that upended the agency’s operations and left officers grumbling that their agency had been eliminated by administrative means”.

Republicans have criticized the Biden administration for the decline in arrests and deportations of immigrants in the interior, and have attributed the increase in newcomers to the US-Mexico border to its “softer” policies. The arrest of 1.7 million people who crossed the border during fiscal 2021 is a record, and the Biden administration's new priorities and guidance are being legally questioned by the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona.

“In FY 2021, ICE also closed two detention centers: the C. Carlos Carreiro Detention Center in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. Motivated by operational and other considerations, the withdrawal of ICE detainees from these facilities flowed from Secretary Mayorkas’ direction that ‘we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention’. Additionally, ICE shifted its operations away from the detention of families while adapting new and existing detention capacity to address an influx along the Southwest Border”.

Last year, as reported by The Washington Post, Mayorkas told Congress he was concerned about the “excessive use” of detention, despite seeing the growing number of immigrants in private facilities, despite Biden's campaign promise to end detention practice.

Advocates for immigrants said they welcomed many of the Biden administration’s early changes, such as ending the travel ban and increasing the number of refugees allowed into the United States. But they said the most recent spending bill increases funding for immigration enforcement and complained that Biden has not kept his campaign promise to end privately run detention, which accounts for the majority of the ICE system [which] has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration, according to the Washington Post.