Twenty-five years after September 11, the number lands like a warning.

The Department of Homeland Security says Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported 2,015 known or suspected terrorists since President Trump returned to office.

ICE arrested more than 2,150 people in that category between January 20, 2025, and September 9, 2026, according to figures DHS provided as the nation prepares to mark the anniversary of the attacks.

The figure is not a campaign promise, a border encounter estimate or a count of people merely questioned.

It is a DHS-reported total of arrests and removals involving people the government classified as known or suspected terrorists.

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Fox News says DHS released the figures on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary and pointed to cases involving alleged members of designated foreign terrorist organizations and suspects accused of plotting mass-casualty attacks. The department says the 2,015 removals occurred during the same period in which ICE made more than 2,150 arrests in the category.

That means the removal count is not a theoretical measure of future enforcement. According to DHS, more than two thousand high-priority cases have already ended with the person being taken out of the United States.

That is what immigration enforcement looks like when national security is treated as a core mission instead of an embarrassing exception.

The language deserves precision.

“Known or suspected terrorist” is a government screening category, not a claim that every person counted was convicted of carrying out a terrorist attack in an American courtroom.

ICE defines a known terrorist as someone identified through a qualifying terrorism-related arrest, charge, indictment or conviction, or someone formally identified as a terrorist or member of a terrorist organization under federal law, an executive order or an international obligation tied to a United Nations Security Council resolution. A suspected terrorist is someone the government reasonably suspects has engaged in, intends to engage in, or is preparing for or helping terrorist activity, which means the label can rest on intelligence and screening information before any American criminal conviction but still requires a national-security basis rather than a routine immigration violation.

That distinction should be stated honestly.

It should not be used to wave away the threat.

The agency’s fiscal-year 2024 report places those cases among its highest-priority removals, alongside gang members and people accused of major human-rights violations or war crimes. ICE reported 237 known or suspected terrorist removals that year, up from 139 in fiscal 2023.

The report also separates those completed removals from arrests, detention counts and border encounters. That makes the category narrower than the sweeping numbers often traded in political arguments about immigration.

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The new DHS figure covers a longer period and comes from the current administration, so it is not a clean apples-to-apples annual comparison.

It does show the scale and priority of the operation now underway.

ICE’s work is also broader than the headline number.

DHS described a separate group of arrests this week involving people convicted of first-degree child molestation, solicitation to commit murder, aggravated assault, weapons offenses and burglary. Those cases came from Rhode Island, Florida, Utah, California and Tennessee.

The department identified one Cuban national convicted of solicitation to commit first-degree murder and cocaine possession. It also named an Iraqi national convicted of assault, drug and illegal-weapons offenses, along with a Guatemalan national convicted of first-degree child molestation.

Those arrests are not included here as terrorism cases. They show the broader public-safety work happening beside the national-security removals and the kind of criminal histories ICE says it is prioritizing.

That focus is exactly what critics of enforcement often claim they want.

Yet the same political movement that demands ICE concentrate on dangerous offenders routinely works to cut off the partnerships that help agents find those offenders inside local jails.

Local-federal cooperation can move a repeat offender from a county arrest into the immigration-enforcement process without forcing agents to hunt for him after release.

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Those agreements allow trained local officers to work with ICE under federal supervision. They matter because a jail is one of the safest places to identify and transfer a removable offender: the person is already in custody, records can be checked and the public is not exposed to another street arrest.

Sanctuary policies reverse that logic. They force federal agents to locate people after release, increasing the risk to officers, suspects and bystanders.

The lesson of September 11 was never that every threat can be eliminated.

It was that complacency has a cost, information must be acted upon and the government’s first responsibility is to protect the American people.

DHS should publish as much supporting detail as operational security and privacy law allow.

Congress should examine the data, the definitions and the disposition of the remaining cases. Big numbers deserve serious oversight.

They also deserve serious attention.

More than two thousand removals in this category represent more than two thousand instances in which the government identified a potential national-security concern and completed the process of getting that person out of the country.

Removing national-security threats is one of the clearest duties a sovereign government has.

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Twenty-five years after 9/11, America should know better than to apologize for vigilance.

 

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