In just a matter of days, President Donald Trump has fully exposed just how lax and unserious the enforcement of immigration laws and border security was under former President Joe Biden with a targeted crackdown on known illegal migrants with criminal records.

The nationwide operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents averaged around 1,000 arrests of criminal migrants over the weekend, which was more than triple the average daily apprehension rate for ICE in 2024 under Biden, according to the Daily Caller.

The relative ease and quickness with which ICE has tracked down and arrested known criminal migrants during Trump's first week in office also infuriatingly revealed that the Biden administration could have similarly apprehended and removed the same dangerous and wanted individuals at any given time but purposely chose not to.

Average daily arrests triple the numbers under Biden

One of the first things that President Trump did upon taking office last week was to effectively unleash ICE and task that agency to conduct targeted enforcement operations, which are defined as the "planned arrests of known criminal aliens who threaten national security or public safety."

On its official X account, ICE has posted daily updates on the numbers of arrests made of known and at-large criminal aliens as well as detainer requests lodged for criminal aliens already held in custody by local law enforcement agencies.

In a trio of posts that reflected the numbers of the prior 24 hours, ICE announced that there had been 956 arrests on Saturday, 1,179 arrests on Sunday, and 969 arrests on Monday, with detainer requests for those days totaling 554 on Saturday, 853 on Sunday, and 869 on Monday.

The Daily Caller noted that under President Biden last year, according to ICE's annual report, the agency averaged around 310 daily arrests of criminal illegal migrants and around 410 daily detainer requests lodged with local law enforcement agencies for them to keep holding wanted migrants in custody.

Arrestees include wanted murderers, child rapists, and suspected terrorists

As noted, the bulk of the arrests made by ICE have been of "known criminal aliens" who were at large in communities across the country, and many of those are rather unsavory characters who posed dangerous risks to those communities and the nation more broadly.

As an example of the sort of people being apprehended by ICE, the White House X account posted a thread of some of the worst individuals who are now in federal custody, including wanted murderers, child rapists, sexual assaulters, drug dealers and traffickers, and suspected Islamist terrorists.

It bears repeating that, by and large, ICE knew exactly where most of those wanted criminal migrants were and agents needed only the authorization of the president and leadership to go into communities and catch them proactively.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the Biden administration deliberately chose not to go and apprehend these dangerous murderers, rapists, and suspected terrorists, despite knowing where they could be found.

"Enhanced targeted operations" in sanctuary city of Chicago

The targeted enforcement operations of ICE that have been happening nationwide are expected to continue for the foreseeable future, though ICE may choose to temporarily focus its attention on certain cities or regions for maximum effect.

Indeed, ICE announced in a Sunday press release that it, along with "federal partners" like "the FBI, ATF, DEA, CBP, and the U.S. Marshals Service," had begun conducting "enhanced targeted operations today in Chicago to enforce U.S. immigration law and preserve public safety and national security by keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities."

Chicago, Illinois, is what is known as a "sanctuary" jurisdiction, in which local officials are prohibited by Democratic lawmakers from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts, and it seems likely that Trump's ICE will continue to conduct similar "enhanced targeted operations" in other uncooperative sanctuary jurisdictions to highlight the dangerousness for the public of such policies.