The White House lashed out Tuesday at The New York Times after the outlet obtained a handful of internal government documents that highlighted a major blindspot in the Trump administration’s deportation push.
President Donald Trump campaigned heavily on mass deportations in the lead-up to his victory last November, and kicked off his second term by instituting a daily arrest quota of 3,000. But as the administration shuffles around law enforcement officers to meet this increased demand, arrests for other crimes such as drug trafficking and illegal firearm possessions have plummeted, the Times reported.
According to the internal government documents obtained by the Times, immigration arrests exploded during this fiscal year, from around 5,000 in 2024 to more than 94,000. Arrests for other crimes, however, plummeted: weapon seizures fell from around 41,000 to about 11,000, a 73 percent decrease.
When asked about this data, the White House didn’t respond kindly.
“Peddling a false narrative!” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, when pressed by the Times on the data, accused the outlet of “cherry-picking” statistics, and insisted that “the Trump administration is making America safer than ever before.”
The documents also showed that narcotics arrests fell this year by 11 percent when compared to last year, and that agents opened 15 percent fewer new investigations into narcotics-related crimes.
While Trump administration officials didn’t take kindly to the Times’ questions, former government officials – like John Tobnon, a former official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations – were free to speak more candidly about the consequences of redirecting law enforcement officers to one mission.
“When you focus the agency on immigration enforcement, you necessarily lose the ability to combat more serious threats,” Tobon told the Times. “Strategically, you’re diverting resources from long-term investigations combating transnational criminal organizations.”