ICE officers across the country were told over the weekend to stop arresting illegal aliens who have no criminal conviction or pending charge, according to agency sources, and the Trump administration spent Saturday night walking it back. Put the reported guidance next to the government's own paperwork and one detail stands out: it would have spared people with final deportation orders, a group even the Obama administration's 2014 enforcement rules put on the arrest list.

What ICE Officers Say They Were Told

The Daily Wire's Jennie Taer broke the story Saturday evening. Agency sources told her that officers "may only arrest illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or charges for the time being," and that people "who have final deportation orders but lack criminal convictions or charges will not be arrested."

The same sources said the change ended so-called collateral arrests. That is the long-standing practice where officers who find their criminal target living alongside other illegal aliens take the others into custody too. Under the reported guidance, only the target would go.

The officers who talked were not happy. "They're trying to calm things down before the elections," one told the Daily Wire. Another predicted, "We'll see the arrest numbers go down."

DHS Called It False. Fox's Sources Said It Went Out Anyway.

The Department of Homeland Security answered on X within hours. "This is false. No one is off the table. We will continue to arrest any and all illegal aliens that come into our path," the department posted, adding that ICE had launched "a nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities" aimed at criminal illegal aliens.

Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin then filled in the gap between those two accounts. After talking with President Trump and nine ICE and DHS sources, Melugin wrote: "Yes, this verbal guidance did go out to ICE offices across the country." He said he was told it was "erroneous," the product of a "miscommunication" during conversations about going after the "worst first."

Trump himself told Melugin that anyone in the country illegally remains "on the table." According to Fox News, new guidance went to ICE field offices Saturday evening to confirm that arrests of illegal aliens without criminal records, collaterals included, will continue. ICE sources told Melugin they received it.

So the order is dead. The question worth asking is how far it would have moved the line if it had stuck.

Even Obama's 2014 Rules Put Final Orders on the List

On November 20, 2014, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson signed a memo that narrowed immigration enforcement into three priority tiers. Conservatives spent the next two years attacking it as a de facto amnesty for millions. Look at what it kept, though.

ICE's own archived page on the Priority Enforcement Program, the program built on Johnson's memo, lists the tiers. Priority 3 reads: "Aliens issued final removal orders on or after January 1, 2014." No criminal record required. If an immigration judge had ordered you out and you stayed, the Obama administration still counted you as an enforcement priority.

The guidance ICE officers described this weekend went further than that. By their account, a person with a final deportation order and no criminal charge was off limits entirely, no matter when the judge ruled. On that one category, the reported instruction was softer than the Obama-era policy Republicans ran against.

Its closest cousin is the Biden administration's. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas's September 30, 2021 enforcement guidelines told officers that "the fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them." That memo is the one House Republicans later cited in their case for impeaching Mayorkas.

Trump's Own Executive Order Says the Opposite

Trump wiped out that framework on his first day back. Executive Order 14159, "Protecting the American People Against Invasion," revoked Biden's Executive Order 13993, the order behind the Mayorkas guidelines. Section 2 sets the policy "to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens."

Section 4 goes straight at the category the weekend guidance would have spared. It tells the Homeland Security Secretary to let ICE set priorities that protect public safety "including by ensuring the successful enforcement of final orders of removal." A verbal instruction to stop arresting final-order cases without criminal records does not fit inside that sentence.

How Many People Sit in the Category That Would Have Been Spared?

ICE sorts everyone it detains into three buckets: convicted criminal, pending criminal charges, and "other immigration violator," meaning nothing on record beyond the immigration violation. The weekend guidance, as described, would have cut off the third bucket.

On July 11, the last date in ICE's most recent published detention file, 65,765 people were in custody. As PatriotAddict reported from ICE's own table, 19,329 were convicted, 20,247 had charges pending, and 26,189 had no criminal record beyond immigration. That last group is 39.8 percent of everyone ICE was holding. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse counts the same snapshot a different way, finding 70.6 percent of detainees had no conviction, because it lumps pending charges in with the uncharged.

Those are detention numbers, not arrest numbers, and the July snapshot is more than two months old. Still, the direction is plain. Roughly two in five people in ICE custody this summer were the kind of case the verbal order would have taken off the street list. "We'll see the arrest numbers go down" was not an exaggeration.

This Is the Second Pullback Trump Has Had to Reverse

Saturday was not the first time. In July, according to the Daily Wire, Mullin briefly halted ICE traffic stops after fatal shootings by ICE officers in Biddeford, Maine, and Houston. Trump publicly ordered the stops back on.

One of Taer's sources said it was unclear whether agency leadership told Trump before calling off non-criminal arrests. "I hope Trump finds out about this sh*t and puts an end to it," that officer said. Within about a day, he did.

The episode lands on a department already under pressure from its own side. Two days earlier, Mullin insisted ICE was not running worksite operations in Kansas. The Daily Wire also noted the White House recently pulled the nomination of Lance Schroyer, Mullin's pick to lead ICE, citing the New York Times.

Why the Midterm Math Cuts the Other Way

The officers' theory was that someone wanted fewer arrests on the news before November. There is polling behind the worry. The Daily Wire cited a Fox News figure putting Trump at 43 percent approval on immigration, down from 48 percent last summer, and Newsweek pointed to an Economist/YouGov tracker showing 40 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval in August.

The trouble with quietly narrowing enforcement is that the voters who put Trump back in office are the ones who notice first. The backlash on the right started within minutes of Taer's post, and it was the White House, not Democrats, that forced the correction.

The Supreme Court has already said who gets the final word on questions like this. When Texas and Louisiana sued over the Mayorkas guidelines, the Court threw the case out for lack of standing in United States v. Texas (2023). Justice Kavanaugh wrote that "through elections, American voters can both influence Executive Branch policies and hold elected officials to account for enforcement decisions."

What to Watch Now

Nothing about this weekend was put in writing, at least nothing the public has seen. The guidance went out verbally, and the correction went out as field guidance described by sources. The cleanest test is the numbers. If ICE's next arrest release shows collaterals and final-order cases holding steady, the correction took. If they drop, the "miscommunication" did its work anyway.

Executive Order 14159 is still the controlling document, and it names final orders of removal by name. Any ICE official who wants to spare that group will have to do it in writing, over the President's signature, or not at all.

Top photo: ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers escort a man in custody during a worksite enforcement operation at a car wash, early 2025. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)