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Trump's Anti-Migrant Crusade More Cost and Fury than Deportations
By Reuters | 02 Jul, 2025
Trump's efforts to keep his pledge to deport 1 million migrants per year is failing, with actual deportations trailing those under the Biden administration while ICE budgets surge.
U.S. President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since January 20.
ARRESTS
Trump won back the White House promising record numbers of deportations. A Trump administration budget document published in June said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aimed to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
ICE has cast a wider net than under former President Joe Biden's Democratic administration, picking up more non-criminals and people with final deportation orders, including those coming to ICE offices for routine check-ins.
ICE arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of violating immigration law from January 20 to the first week of June, according to the White House. The figure amounts to an average of 750 arrests per day - double the average over the past decade.
Still, the pace of arrests remains far short of what Trump would need to deport millions of people.
Top White House official Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration agenda, pressed ICE to escalate operations in late May. Miller set a quota for at least 3,000 arrests per day and told ICE leadership they should target anyone without legal status.
The increased enforcement led to protests in Los Angeles and other cities. ICE in June ordered officers to generally refrain from immigration sweeps at farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants, but the Trump administration then rescinded the guidance.
DETENTION
ICE statistics show the number of people arrested by ICE with no other criminal charges or convictions and then detained rose from about 860 in January to 11,800 as of June 15 - an increase of nearly 1,300%.
Those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions also rose, but at a lower rate of 101%.
ICE had more than 56,000 immigrants in custody as of June 15, well beyond its funded capacity of 41,500.
A sweeping tax and spending bill that Republicans aim to bring to final passage in the U.S. House of Representatives this week would devote an estimated $170 billion to immigration enforcement. The massive funding boost would cover a White House request for 100,000 detention beds, according to an analysis of the legislation by the pro-immigration American Immigration Council.
DEPORTATIONS
The Trump administration has struggled to increase deportation levels even as it has opened new pathways to send migrants to countries other than their home country, such as sending Venezuelans to Mexico, El Salvador or Panama.
Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, said in late May that the administration had deported around 200,000 people over four months. The total appeared to lag deportations during a similar period under Biden, whose administration had 257,000 deportations from February-May 2024, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics.
Biden's administration faced much higher levels of illegal immigration and quickly deported many of those crossing illegally, boosting deportation totals.
DHS stopped issuing detailed statistical reports on immigration enforcement after Trump took office, which makes it harder to gauge the scope of the crackdown.
STRIPPING LEGAL STATUS
The Supreme Court in May allowed the Trump administration to proceed with terminating Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Venezuelans, paving the way for Trump to terminate it for other nations.
TPS provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the U.S. if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
The Trump administration rolled back a Biden-era extension of TPS for 521,000 Haitians, but that move was blocked by a federal judge on Tuesday, pushing the termination at least to February 2026. The administration also ended the status for thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon, moves that take effect in the coming days and weeks.
The Supreme Court in June let the Trump administration proceed with stripping legal status from half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who entered under a Biden-era "parole" program.
Trump said in March that he was weighing a similar move to revoke parole for Ukrainians.
The administration in April began notifying people who entered legally under Biden using an app known as CBP One that their status had been revoked.
BORDER SECURITY
Trump issued a series of executive orders when he returned to the White House, implementing a broad ban on asylum for migrants encountered at the southern border and sending in troops to assist border security efforts.
His measures built on some initiatives already under way by the end of Biden's tenure, including a similar asylum ban and a push to increase Mexican enforcement. The policies appear to have successfully reduced traffic.
U.S. Border Patrol arrested 6,070 migrants at the southern border in June, according to preliminary figures released by the Trump administration, a new monthly low that fell beyond the previous low in March. Monthly figures are not available prior to 2000.
Migrant arrests are often used as a proxy to estimate illegal crossings although some migrants enter undetected.
The arrest totals since Trump took office have been far below those under Biden, which peaked at 250,000 in December 2023.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Jason Lange and Idrees Ali in Washington; Editing by Mary Milliken, Chizu Nomiyama, Howard Goller, Matthew Lewis, Alexandra Hudson)
A sweeping tax and spending bill that Republicans aim to bring to final passage in the U.S. House of Representatives this week would devote an estimated $170 billion to immigration enforcement.
ICE agents detail people under a deportation sweep in Los Angeles in early June, 2025.
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