Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday that approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants with final deportation orders are currently living in the United States — and roughly half of them have criminal convictions.
That's 800,000 people whom an immigration judge already ordered removed from the country, who broke the law again after arriving here illegally, and who remained anyway. The orders weren't issued by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. They came from immigration judges within the Department of Justice — the judicial process that amnesty advocates constantly insist must be respected.
The process spoke. Nobody enforced it.
According to Fox News, Lyons broke the numbers down further during questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., offering a state-level snapshot that sharpens the national picture. In Minnesota alone — a state that has become a flashpoint for clashes over immigration enforcement — Lyons testified that there are 16,840 individuals with final deportation orders at large.
"There's 16,840 final orders at large in the state of Minnesota."
Minnesota. One state. Nearly 17,000 people, a judge told to leave, who simply didn't. Multiply that pattern across fifty states, and you begin to understand how 1.6 million becomes not a statistic but a systemic failure — one that previous administrations chose to tolerate.
Lyons made clear that these deportation orders were issued through the legal system's own channels:
"Through an immigration judge with the Department of Justice separate from Immigration Customs Enforcement."
This distinction matters. Every time critics accuse the administration of acting unilaterally or bypassing due process, the answer is sitting in 1.6 million case files. These people received hearings. They received orders. The system rendered its judgment. What was missing — for years — was anyone willing to carry it out.
Lankford used his time to connect the current enforcement challenge to the open-border conditions that created it. The senator's testimony painted a picture of a border that functionally ceased to exist:
"Two years ago, we had 10,000 people a day illegally crossing into the country, two years ago, 10,000 people a day not vetted, had no idea who they were."
Ten thousand a day. That's not immigration — it's capitulation dressed up as compassion.
Lankford went further, citing the Biden administration's own estimates on one of the most alarming categories of border crossers:
"70,000 people were estimated by the Biden administration to come in in 2024 that were special interest aliens that had a locational connection to terrorism."
The Biden administration knew. Its own estimates flagged 70,000 individuals entering the country with ties to regions connected to terrorism — and the border remained open. Lankford drove the point home:
"But we had no idea who they were. They were allowed to be able to come into the country two years ago."
This is the inheritance. Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in emphasis. A security catastrophe that the previous administration documented in its own data and then chose to ignore.
While ICE agents work to execute the deportation orders that judges issued — in some cases years ago — they face an increasingly hostile environment on the ground. Two activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, died in altercations with federal officers in Minnesota, incidents that have fueled protests against enforcement operations.
Lankford addressed the nature of those protests directly, describing a pattern that goes well beyond peaceful dissent:
"There are thousands of arrests that are happening in a day that are happening by the book. And what's happening is a group of protesters that are protesting and agitating, and some of them running into churches and disturbing church services and saying, 'It's my First Amendment right to shut down your church during a service.' And saying they're a peaceful protester while they throw rocks at agents, it just gets old."
There's a particular kind of audacity in invoking the First Amendment to disrupt someone else's worship — then throwing rocks at federal agents and calling it a peaceful protest. The contradiction doesn't need commentary. It speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats have threatened to defund DHS unless the agency changes its enforcement approach. The logic is remarkable: the judicial system issued 1.6 million deportation orders, agents are finally executing them, and the response from the left is to strip funding from the agency doing the work the courts demanded.
Lankford closed his remarks by acknowledging the men and women doing the actual work of enforcement — the agents operating under threat, executing lawful orders in communities where local politicians and activist groups treat them as the enemy.
"The work that the men and women that work around you have done have stopped that chaos."
He also offered a broader observation that deserves to echo beyond the committee room:
"We're losing perspective of what's really happened."
He's right. The national conversation has drifted so far from the underlying reality that enforcing a judge's order now gets treated as authoritarian overreach. A country that cannot remove people its own courts have ordered deported is not exercising compassion — it's advertising that its laws mean nothing.
There are 1.6 million tests of that proposition sitting in the United States right now. Eight hundred thousand of them have criminal records. The question was never whether enforcement would be difficult. The question is whether a nation that refuses to enforce its own judicial orders can still call itself a nation of laws.
