Dr. John Lott has a new piece at the New York Post evaluating the media’s claims about Trump’s immigration enforcement during 2025. It is important to recognize that these numbers are strongly biased in favor of making the Obama administration immigration enforcement look better because they measured detentions differently than under Trump. Under Obama, the classification of border apprehensions was changed to removals, with 72% of the apprehensions i in 2015 and 77% of them in 2016 were border apprehensions. Unfortunately, the only erroneous detention data from a Democrat administration that we can compare the Trump administration in 2025 is during the last two years of the Obama administration. After this article, we have also added some non-government estimates of Americans accidentally detained for the 2003 to 2010 period, but those show U.S. citizens accidentally detained by ICE at least 149 times higher than by Trump in 2025.
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ChatGPT’s evaluation of the New York Post article is available here.
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The media narrative against President Donald Trump’s effort to enforce immigration law was on full display last week at a White House press briefing.
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“Earlier you were just defending ICE agents . . . that they were doing everything correctly,” Niall Stanage of The Hill challenged Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
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“Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year; 170 US citizens were detained by ICE. And, uh, Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?”
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Countless news stories have amplified fears that under Trump, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are wildly violating basic rights.
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NPR, to cite just one example, recently claimed that “many” American citizens “have been mistaken” for illegal immigrants, and that there’s “a long history of immigration agencies not having a good track record.”
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But the numbers tell a very different story about how ICE is doing under Trump.
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Let’s set the baseline: Between the president’s Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration and the end of November, Trump’s administration arrested an extraordinary total of 595,000 illegal aliens and deported 605,000.
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The 170 ICE-detained US citizens cited in Stanage’s diatribe included about 130 arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers, according to the left-leaning ProPublica — justifiable under any reading of the law.
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Only about 40 or so of those who were detained claimed to be US citizens accidentally or erroneously arrested by ICE.
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But just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours.
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Any error is serious, but 40 mistakes out of 595,000 arrests amounts to an error rate of just 0.0067% — roughly one wrongful detention for every 14,925 arrests.
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Compare that with the final two years of President Barack Obama’s administration.
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In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (book-ins), and four mistaken removals.
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During those two years, ICE made a mere 239,645 arrests, meaning the 54 mistaken detentions alone produced an Obama error rate of 0.0225% —about one mistake for every 4,444 arrests.
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Overall, the error rate under Obama was 3.36 times higher than under Trump.
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Unfortunately, there’s no comparable public erroneous detention data for other past administrations, or the rest of the Obama years.
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As further evidence of ICE’s irresponsibility, Stanage charged that “32 people died in ICE custody last year.”
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That claim, however, misleads without context; the numbers only make sense when compared across administrations.
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During the course of Obama’s two terms, from 2009 to 2017, 56 individuals died in ICE custody.
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That administration didn’t publish clear detention totals, but the closest available figures show about 498,646 detentions and deportations over five fiscal years, an average of roughly 99,729 per year.
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If that annual rate held throughout the entire administration, ICE processed about 797,834 individuals.
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Under that estimate, 56 deaths translates into a rate of 0.007% — roughly one death for every 14,314 detainees.
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By comparison, the rate last year under Trump was slightly lower: 0.0054%, or one death for every 18,594 detainees.
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Both those figures are substantially below the average death rate for the detainee age group.
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Stanage omits one key data point: the number of Americans accidentally involuntarily deported.
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The reason for him not doing so is straightforward — none occurred.
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That’s right, for all the tumult and fury, ICE under Trump made no erroneous deportations through October.
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By contrast, ICE under Obama deported two US citizens in fiscal year 2015, and two more in fiscal year 2016.
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All the media lies and distortions bring disturbing real-world impacts.
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Amid the drumbeat of false coverage, 57% of Americans now disapprove of how ICE enforces immigration laws, a Quinnipiac University survey found this month, with only 40% saying they approve of ICE’s actions.
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Another recent poll, conducted by CNN/SSRS, found that 51% of adults now say ICE enforcement is making cities less safe.
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The critics’ demonization tactics are making federal agents’ jobs considerably more dangerous.
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Assaults on federal immigration officers increased by 1,347% in 2025, as agents experienced a terrifying 8,000% surge in death threats.
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Car attacks on ICE agents spiked by 3,200%, The Post reported.
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And in just the last few days, hackers leaked the home addresses and personal identifying information of about 4,500 employees of ICE and the US Border Patrol — multiplying the risks to their safety.
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No federal agency is perfect. In immigration enforcement, as in all law enforcement operations, mistakes will be made.
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But the media’s lack of perspective on the data, and its refusal to put the numbers in context, is putting a match to an explosive public debate.
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Responsible journalism should inform us, not distort reality — or fuel hostility toward those doing a difficult and dangerous job.
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Other notes
Data on deaths of those detained by ICE
We did news searches and with ChatGPT and Grok on illegal aliens who died in ICE custody, and I come up with only four cases, but two of those were murdered by the anti-ICE activists the during the Sept. 24, 2025 sniper attack at the ICE Dallas Field Office and the third one is Geraldo Lunas Campos who died this year after he was injured during the struggle when he was arrested! There is only one real case last year: Josué Castro Rivera, a 25-year-old from Honduras, died on October 23, 2025, after being struck by a vehicle while fleeing ICE agents during an attempted detention. Unfortunately, the ProPublica and law firms that put together the data on ICE activities don’t provide a breakdown of causes of deaths, which in itself is a warning sign. After all, if they were bad cases, you would think they would make a big deal about them, right?
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Note also that the average across these groups (covering ages 20-49) is approximately 2.0 per 1,000, so the death rate for those in the ICE custody is much, much lower! So even including deaths like the shooting at the ICE Dallas Field Office, the number of deaths during Trump was 1 for every 18,594 detainees and for the general population of 20 to 49 year olds it would have been 37.2 per 18,594 people — to put it differently, the death rate for the general population is 37.2 times greater than for those in ICE custody!
Using non-government reports on errors in those who are detained
Since we started this work, additional non-government estimates of U.S. citizens who were detained have been seen. Northwestern University professor Jacqueline Stevens’ research (based on FOIA requests and court records) estimated more than 20,000 U.S. citizens detained by ICE from 2003–2010. “It would be truly shocking if this did not result in the deportation of U.S. citizens,” Stevens’ writes. The estimated rate of U.S. citizens detained by ICE from 2003 to 2010, based on Stevens’ extrapolation from FIRRP (Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project) data and other sources, is approximately 1%. This derives from her analysis of verified cases (e.g., 1% of 8,027 detainees in sampled Arizona facilities from 2006–2008 were confirmed U.S. citizens) applied nationally to the total of over 2.4 million individuals detained during that period (sum of annual book-ins/admissions: ~2,444,514), yielding her estimate of more than 20,000 wrongful detentions. The estimate of over 4,000 in 2010 (20% of the total in just one of the eight years implies that there was a disproportionate rate of these problems under Obama).
Stevens’ sample from Arizona facilities (representing about 10% of U.S. detainees during the sampled period of 2006–2008) found 82 confirmed U.S. citizen detentions out of 8,027 total detainees reviewed, yielding a raw rate of 1% (82 / 8,027 ≈ 0.01, or 1%). That is an error rate 149 times higher than the rate for Trump and 39 times higher than the rate under 2015 and 2016 under Obama. If Stevens estimates are indeed conservative, the numbers for these earlier years would show an even greater for error for those years compared to Trump in 2025 or Obama in 2015 and 2016.
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