Donald Trump triumphantly returned to the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, with the mission of inaugurating a “new golden age” for the United States. And transforming immigration was always a central component of that grand vision that began with an avalanche of executive orders signed on his first day in office. The promise was to carry out the “largest deportation in history” and expel all undocumented immigrants from the country. This goal is elusive, both because the exact number of undocumented immigrants is unknown, and because records of all deportations in U.S. history are lacking.
The initial target ranged from 11 million people — the official number of undocumented migrants — to around 20 million — the highest figure Trump ever mentioned during the campaign. But with his second presidency now past the nine-month mark, reality has eroded these objectives, and a more modest — if equally enormous — deportation goal has emerged, according to various reports: one million people.
To successfully expel so many people from the country, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) machinery must not only be well-oiled, but also expanded at every stage of the deportation effort: arrests, detentions in immigration centers and prisons, and repatriation flights or flights to third countries. The new budget that ICE received as part of the mega-law passed in July will allow for an unprecedented agency expansion in a bid to reach those goals.
For now, however, the increase in ICE activities, while significant and firmly establishing a climate of fear among migrant communities across the country, has not reached the levels the Administration has set for itself, according to reports and figures released by the agency itself.
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, there was talk of achieving 1,000 daily apprehensions, a significant increase from the average of around 300 at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency. In May, following a meeting in which Deputy Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor Stephen Miller lashed out at immigration officials for the low numbers of apprehensions and deportations, the numbers suddenly spiked as information circulated that the new goal was 3,000 arrests per day. Although ICE arrests increased from around 18,000 in April to 23,000 in May and 31,500 in June, the 3,000 daily figure has never been reached, and over the summer, apprehensions stabilized again around 30,000 a month.
But in addition to the rising number of arrests, another trend in this first stage of the deportation process illustrates the transformation of the immigration machinery under Trump. While previously the vast majority of migrant arrests were made by Border Patrol officers on or near the border with Mexico, detaining people who had just crossed the river or the desert, now ICE is carrying out virtually all migrant detentions. The reason is twofold: on the one hand, the rhetoric and the reinforcement of military surveillance on the border has almost completely halted illegal border crossings, leaving no one to arrest at the border; and on the other, ICE is carrying out massive raids across the country and, in particular, arresting people when they show up for their appointments in the country’s immigration courts.
In the next step of the process, immigration detention, the landscape has changed dramatically in the past nine months. First, the population in ICE custody has soared by almost 50%, from nearly 40,000 people in January to about 60,000 in September. This has naturally followed the increases in arrests, which can be seen especially in the number of detainees without any criminal record, which rose sharply after the Miller meeting in May.
Considering that ICE detention centers were already at maximum capacity when Trump came back to power, to cope with this increase in the detainee population, which some experts believe could actually be even higher than reported, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE have resorted to every solution they could. Detention centers that had been closed have been reopened, others have been built in record time — such as Alligator Alcatraz and Camp East Montana in El Paso, among others — and people are being detained in hold rooms and more conventional prisons. At the same time, reports of ongoing abuse and deplorable conditions, as well as overcrowding, have become so frequent that they no longer seem to shock anyone.
The final step is the removal of as many undocumented migrants as possible from the country. At the time of Trump’s inauguration, around 13,000 people were being deported each month; now, the figure is approaching 30,000, after nine months of sustained increases. In total, according to official ICE data, 168,841 people were deported between January and August. This is still far from “the largest deportation in history,” and even from the more realistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.
Although the Trump administration has cited higher figures without providing evidence, its data includes all people who have voluntarily left the country in response to the immigration climate created by the president, including people with green cards. Still, the total number of deportations, whether ordinary or “self-deportations,” as the administration has chosen to call them, is still far from “the highest in history.”
Among existing records of past mass deportations, Operation Wetback — former president Dwight Eisenhower’s mass expulsion of Mexican workers who had arrived in the United States in the 1930s and during World War II — remains far ahead, with an estimated two million deportees, half of whom were U.S. citizens. And during former president Barack Obama’s two terms in office, three million people were deported, making the Democratic former president the “deporter-in-chief.” However, with more than three years of his term still remaining and unprecedented new funding for ICE, surpassing that of other agencies like the FBI and the DEA, Trump still has time to fulfill his promise.
The post More Deportations, but Far From the ‘Largest in History’ appeared first on American Renaissance.
American Renaissance
