ICE Director: Biden Admin Cooked the Books on Illegal Alien Arrests

Surprising no one except perhaps CNN, the Biden administration was lying egregiously about how many illegal aliens it arrested, classifying thousands of illegals released into America as arrests.

You can trust Marxists always to call something the opposite of what it is, and the Marxist Democrats always do just that. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons publicly exposed the latest discovered Biden administration immigration fraud, which involved labeling illegal aliens who were released into our country as ICE “arrests.”

The Biden-Harris administration didn’t include the hundreds of thousands of illegals it brought in through the CBP One app in its entry numbers, and now Lyons is descrbiing the latest nonsense. “We have uncovered that the previous administration… was cooking the books on ICE data,” Lyons explained to 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 Trump administration is shining a light on the rot amidst its border crackdown. Lyons added, “A comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE. 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 Biden admin categorized illegal aliens that they released into our country as “arrests.”

They manipulated and skewed the numbers to deceive the American people. pic.twitter.com/AGYiz3XEh0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 14, 2025

Fox News reported:

Senior officials said that the majority of the overall 113,431 arrests made in FY 2024 were "pass-through" arrests, meaning that ICE didn’t take an enforcement action against those foreign nationals, and they instead just passed through ICE before being released into the interior and were told to report to an ICE office.
They stressed that none of the arrests made by ICE under the Trump administration have been pass-through arrests.

“What we are doing now is actual immigration enforcement, not enforcement theater” at ICE, an official clarified.

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin has praised Lyons, a colleague of border czar Tom Homan, for his previous work arresting criminal illegal aliens and fighting sanctuary city policies in leftist Boston, Massachusetts. “He has a big task ahead of him, as President Trump wants large numbers of deportations, and ICE only has about 5,500 ERO (enforcement and removal officers) nationwide. ICE’s non detained docket had exploded to 7.7 million by the end of Biden’s presidency. ICE will need more resources and manpower,” Melugin argued.

NEW: DHS Secretary Noem announced today that Todd Lyons will lead ICE as its acting director & will be tasked to carry out the Trump admin’s deportation plans.

Lyons is close w/ Tom Homan & led ICE’s elite Boston field office until last year. He is well respected within ICE &… pic.twitter.com/2sny18jJl4
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) March 9, 2025