Funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agencies was at the epicenter of the recently resolved budget impasse. This roadblock, resulting in a record-long 75-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, was focused on how ICE was staffed and directed by the Trump administration.

During his campaign in 2024, President Donald Trump promised he would solve the nation’s immigration problem, a focus that dates back to his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border during his first term. The president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated an additional $75 billion of funding to ICE over a four-year period, far beyond its annual $10 billion appropriation, making it impervious to congressional actions that most agencies require to be funded annually.

Yet with such an infusion of money, have ICE efforts over the past year really produced good outcomes for our nation?

Trump has blamed his predecessor for many of the nation’s immigration problems. So you would assume that ICE never did anything during President Joe Biden’s administration. But this is not so.

Looking back to the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, ICE deported more than 271,000 people, or just over 22,000 people per month — the largest such number for more than a decade. It also achieved this with a significantly smaller budget and far fewer ICE officers.

This pre-Trump version of ICE also did not overwhelm cities like Minneapolis. It did not create massive detention centers, with a growing list of deaths at such facilities. ICE officers did not wear face masks, nor did they enter homes without judicial warrants. They also did not routinely apprehend U.S. citizens and legally authorized immigrants, or kill U.S. citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed in January 2026 that 675,000 people were deported by ICE in Trump’s first year in office. In addition, 2.2 million people were reported to have self-deported.

Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem routinely exaggerated or misrepresented what immigration enforcement officers accomplished. Her description of the deceased Alex Pretti brandishing a gun that threatened the lives of Border Patrol officers was quickly debunked, with several videos showing how he was killed despite posing no threat. Noem eventually backtracked from her statements.

Noem’s actions in supporting the president made it difficult to assess the veracity of any numbers coming out of the Department of Homeland Security and her credibility as the leader for the agency, which eventually contributed to her dismissal. The department’s new head, Markwayne Mullin, has an opportunity to “right this ship” and report the facts — not the fiction that the administration would like told.

The bar for immigration arrests can be reasonably set at 22,000 per month. Early reports suggested that quotas set at 3,000 per day, or 90,000 per month, resulted in inappropriate apprehensions of U.S. citizens or documented immigrants in their search for dangerous illegal aliens. But less than 14 percent of the 400,000 immigrants arrested in 2025 had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.

Has the price paid by our nation over the past year been worth the zealous methods employed by immigration enforcement agencies? Even more importantly, have such actions done anything positive to address the nation’s immigration issues?

What the One Big Beautiful Bill Act did was enable paramilitary units with immigration enforcement powers. Yet at what price? And how far will they be allowed to go, with resistance coming from people in communities affected and lawmakers who recognize the unconstitutional tactics employed?

Indeed, to address the immigration problems in our nation, “far” is more important than "fast."

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Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public policy. . This piece was originally published by The Hill.

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