The Free Press
In the first 100-plus days of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration has deported around 142,000 illegal immigrants. For all the Sturm und Drang over Trump’s deportation policies, the number is lower than the Biden administration deported during the same time a year ago. At this pace, the Trump administration is on track to deport a little over 518,000 illegal immigrants by the end of the year, far fewer than the president’s lofty goal of one million deportations—a shortfall that the legacy media has been quick to point out.
What explains the gap between the numbers Trump promised and the numbers he has delivered so far?
The answer lies in the messy on-the-ground reality of America’s immigration system, which throws up many practical, legal, and political obstacles. And despite the moves Trump has made, such as invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, many of those obstacles remain in place.
Let’s start with the good news for the administration: The single biggest reason why Trump’s deportation numbers are lower than Biden’s is that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border has plummeted. During Biden’s last year in office, border patrol encountered between 145,000 and 300,000 migrants each month trying to cross the border illegally. As a result, some 82 percent of the Biden administration’s deportations took place at the border, where officers would turn migrants around and send them back. Now? In April, border patrol only encountered 8,000 illegal migrants. A senior official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told The Free Press that migration through Panama’s treacherous Darien Gap is down by 99 percent. So immigrants seem to be heeding Trump’s “day one” executive order, which effectively closed the border by ordering that immigrants who cross illegally be promptly detained and removed.
With the number of encounters so low, the only way to deport large numbers of illegal migrants is to find them in cities and towns across the country. That is a lot harder than turning someone back at the border.
The administration is using the Alien Enemies Act as a legal tactic to claim that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that Trump designated as a foreign terrorist organization, has invaded the U.S. and thus can be deported without a court hearing. He signed the executive order announcing the use of the act on March 15, and within a matter of hours, 137 alleged Tren de Aragua gang members were deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s high-security prison.
The move, of course, has proved enormously controversial. The Alien Enemies Act is a law that is only supposed to be invoked when the U.S. is either at war or threatened with invasion. And critics say that the influx of Tren de Aragua gang members does not constitute an invasion.
In addition, judges have ruled that immigrants have due process rights that the Trump administration has ignored. The first to make such a ruling was District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg, who ordered a temporary halt to the deportations even as the alleged gang members were being flown to El Salvador. On April 7 the Supreme Court weighed in, ruling that anyone being deported under the Alien Enemies Act had a right to a hearing before removal from the country. Since then, federal judges in New York, Colorado, and Texas have prevented the administration from relying on the act to justify deporting alleged Tren de Aragua gang members. On Tuesday, however, Pennsylvania U.S. District Judge Stephanie Haines ruled that President Trump’s invocation of the act was legal, but that there must be “greater notice to those subject to removal.”
Jed Rubenfeld, who teaches constitutional law at Yale and is a Free Press columnist, said that though there is disagreement about how Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that illegal aliens have a right to a hearing before being deported. According to Rubenfeld, it’s too early to say if the administration’s reliance on the Alien Enemies Act has backfired as a deportation strategy; it will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide. “If the Supreme Court upholds the lower court rulings, then the Alien Enemies Act gambit will have been a failure, and there will be a mess to clean up.”
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, told The Free Press that the Trump administration was aware that the “mass deportation” process would be riddled with legal obstacles. “They knew things would get held up sometimes, so that’s why they are moving so quickly,” said Vaughan. “And you can see that the Trump team has been trying to move detainees to parts of the country where they hope the judges will be more open to their arguments. I’m sure many of the arguments were predicted, but I’m not sure anyone could have predicted the resistance mentality, as opposed to different legal views, of some of the federal judges.”
The FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan in late April for allegedly helping an illegal immigrant evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers by shuffling him and his lawyer out a back door before he could be arrested. On Tuesday, she was indicted and charged with obstructing immigration agents. In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, 150 former federal and state judges from all over the country called Dugan’s arrest an “attempt to intimidate and threaten the judiciary.”
The fiercely contested legal questions are only part of the challenge for the administration; there are also a myriad of logistical issues that plague the deportation process. ICE, for example, is woefully understaffed, given the size of the task it has been handed.
“ICE hasn’t been fully staffed for decades, which is a problem that’s persisted over the course of several administrations,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
ICE is currently borrowing law-enforcement agents from the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and even the U.S. Postal Service Police to help carry out enforcement efforts. To remedy this staffing issue, the House Judiciary Committee has advanced a congressional budget bill—Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—that includes $8 billion to hire 10,000 additional ICE personnel and $45 billion for new immigration detention facilities.
In a statement to The Free Press, an ICE spokesperson said that “in order to fulfill our mandate, we need more resources to overcome the challenges that currently face nearly every aspect of our critical national security and public safety mission.”
A congressional source told The Free Press that if passed, the proposals would “more than double immigration detention capacity to 100,000 beds and enable one million removals per year.”
Making matters more complicated for ICE is the fact that it faces stiff opposition from local jurisdictions. Not surprisingly, arrests and deportations run much more smoothly when local law enforcement agencies hand over to ICE an illegal immigrant who is in jail for an alleged crime. In New York City, for instance, Mayor Eric Adams, who promised to help the Trump administration root out illegal immigration when criminal charges against him were dropped, gave ICE access to the city jail in Rikers Island. (A judge temporarily blocked that access late last month, citing the need for a hearing.) It’s a different story in sanctuary cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, and in jurisdictions like Prince George’s County, Maryland, which rarely cooperate with the Trump administration, often releasing illegal immigrants back into the community and forcing ICE to perform labor-intensive searches to find them.
“The daily average of interior arrests is almost double what they were during the Biden administration,” Putzel-Kavanaugh told The Free Press. “But it’s a slow process.”
Rene Pop-Chub, 32, an illegal immigrant and alleged murderer from Guatemala who had already been deported twice, was released from a Prince George’s County correctional facility last month before ICE could take him into federal custody at the jail. ICE re-arrested Pop-Chub four days after he was released.
Earlier this month, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan suggested that the government hasn’t ruled out arresting the leaders of sanctuary states and jurisdictions for committing a felony by harboring and concealing illegal aliens. “Wait till you see what’s coming,” he told reporters.
Last Friday, Newark mayor Ras Baraka, a fierce critic of Trump’s immigration policy, was arrested for trespassing at an ICE detention center after he tried to enter the facility alongside New Jersey U.S. representatives LaMonica McIver, Robert Menendez, and Bonnie Watson Coleman.
Perhaps the most underwhelming part of the administration’s strategy so far has been self-deportation. Officials had high hopes that their tough approach would convince illegal immigrants that they would be better off leaving the country without being arrested by ICE. The Trump administration turned Biden’s “CPB One” phone application, which over 900,000 immigrants used to enter the U.S. under temporary humanitarian parole status, into the “CPB Home” application, which immigrants can now use to return home. But so far there have only been around 9,000 self-deportations. The administration is now offering a carrot as well as a stick to boost these numbers. Last Monday, DHS announced that it will pay for the return flights of self-deportees and give them an additional $1,000 once they’ve left. According to DHS secretary Kristi Noem, this plan will cost 70 percent less than detaining and deporting a migrant.
DHS is also finding it challenging to locate illegal immigrants due to missing and incomplete data. In tens of thousands of cases, the government has simply lost track of immigrants who crossed the border seeking asylum. During the Biden administration, these migrants had their asylum requests processed at the border and were supposed to get a so-called Alien Number—an identification number used to track the immigration status of noncitizens.
But in 2022, a record-breaking year in which 2.8 million illegal immigrants crossed the border, an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report found that border patrol officers and detention centers were so overwhelmed that they failed to issue Alien Numbers in a third of the cases. (The sample size of 384 cases was small, however.) A subsequent OIG report found that between March of 2021 and August of 2022, addresses for 177,000 illegal immigrants were either not recorded or were not legitimate.
“If you can’t find the illegal immigrants, then you can’t remove them,” the congressional source told The Free Press. “Law enforcement has largely no idea where these individuals are.”
There’s more: the enormous backlog at the immigration courts, which are supposed to adjudicate whether or not someone should be removed from the U.S. The current backlog for the court is 3.7 million cases, with some illegal immigrants having Notice to Appear paperwork as far out as two years or more.
There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants residing within the U.S. as of 2022, according to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (more current numbers are under review by the Trump administration). DHS has hardly given up on increasing the number of deportations—the additional billions in funding, assuming it comes through, will add ICE personnel and more detention center space. And at some point, the legal questions around the Alien Enemies Act will be settled.
But the administration is also contemplating yet more controversial steps to speed up the process. Late last week, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told reporters that the administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, or the right to challenge if a person’s detention is valid. It’s only happened four times in U.S. history. (The first time came during the Civil War.) Another tactic is to make E-Verify, the online system that alerts employers of an employee’s eligibility to work within the U.S., mandatory. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville introduced an E-Verify bill in late March to deter illegal immigration.
Jessica Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies said she expects the administration’s efforts to take greater effect this fall. “I think a lot of people are going to wait until the summer is over and then go home when their kids finish school, or after they get their affairs in order when employers start to see that they may be investigated for illegal hiring,” Vaughan said.
Read more immigration coverage from Madeleine Rowley:
