Democrats and their media allies continue to portray Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a rogue creation of the Trump era, despite the agencys 25-year history and a record under President Donald Trump that is demonstrably more precise than under Barack Obama.
According to Gateway Pundit, the political left has seized on ICE as a convenient vehicle for anti-Trump agitation, ignoring data that undercuts their narrative of systemic abuse. For many progressives, Obama could do no wrong and Trump can do no right, a mindset that shapes coverage far more than facts or context.
A detailed analysis highlighted in the New York Post under the headline, How Trumps ICE enforcement record blows Obamas out of the water by a lot, lays out the numbers that the mainstream press largely sidesteps. Lets set the baseline: Between the presidents Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration and the end of November, Trumps administration arrested an extraordinary total of 595,000 illegal aliens and deported 605,000.
Critics have latched onto a figure of 170 ICE-detained U.S. citizens to paint a picture of widespread abuse, but the underlying facts tell a different story. The 170 ICE-detained US citizens cited in Stanages diatribe included about 130 arrested for interfering with or assaulting officers, according to the left-leaning ProPublica justifiable under any reading of the law.
That leaves a relatively small pool of potential wrongful detentions. Only about 40 or so of those who were detained claimed to be US citizens accidentally or erroneously arrested by ICE, and just half of those people were held for more than a day; most were released in a few hours.
When measured honestly, the error rate under President Trump is remarkably low for an agency handling hundreds of thousands of cases. 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.
By contrast, the Obama years so often romanticized by the left produced a far worse record on this metric. In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (book-ins), and four mistaken removals.
Those errors occurred despite a significantly lower enforcement volume. 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.
The bottom line is stark and inconvenient for Trumps critics. Overall, the error rate under Obama was 3.36 times higher than under Trump.
People are noticing the obvious double standard, even if legacy outlets refuse to acknowledge it. The media knows all of this, yet they pretend they dont. And we all know why.
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