Still Waiting For Mass Deportations: A Hard Look at Trump’s Illegal Immigration Record

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Donald Trump’s campaign promise to oversee the “largest deportation operation” in American history is not going to materialize. The daily average number of ICE arrests is nowhere near the 6,849 necessary to remove just the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants ushered in under Biden. At the current pace of roughly 700 arrests daily, Trump is poised to deport just over 1 million illegal immigrants by the end of his term— a far cry from the estimated 20 million currently residing within America’s borders. To offer some perspective, President Obama deported approximately 5 million across his two terms in office. His predecessors, Clinton and W. Bush respectively deported 12 and 10 million. Trump, in his first term, only managed to deport 1.5 million illegal immigrants.

Despite Trump’s reputation as strong on the border, his record proves it to be unearned. While Biden’s unprecedented failures may cast Trump’s in a better light, one should remember that America’s illegal immigration crisis didn't begin in 2020. As conditions have worsened, it seems Americans have gotten used to failure on the border. One may recall, in 2015, Trump hinged his campaign on halting the unbroken flood of immigrants permeating the border and installing a wall to seal it. After 4 years, his vow of 1,950 miles of towering border wall was hardly realized in 458 miles of miscellaneous fencing and steel barriers. While not all blame can be placed at Trump’s feet, given the steep opposition he faced in Congress to construction (where he eventually ended up diverting 3.8 billion in Pentagon funding to finance it), it should remind voters to temper their expectations. On the front of illegal immigration, things more or less stayed constant, which, in itself, is nothing to be proud of.

Under Obama’s administration, the illegal population decreased from 12.2 million to 10.7. Yet by the end of Trump’s administration, this number surpassed 11 million. In fiscal 2019, Trump presided over a 47% increase in border crossings from fiscal 2016. Even more disheartening, the last two months of Trump’s presidency saw only 71,141 and 75,315 apprehended at the border, as compared with Obama’s 43,251 and 31,576. While in April 2020, during the height of the pandemic, crossings fell to a relative low of 16,182, they steadily rose every consecutive month afterward. While covid saw the strange resurrection of the nation-state, abating both trade and the movement of peoples legal and illegal, it has long since passed. Globalism continues in its breakneck hurtle, and on the front of illegal immigration, Trump has been unable to subdue it. This reality has not shaken the public’s perception of Trump, however. In October 2020, voters still viewed him as formidable on the border, leading by a margin of 14% over Kamala.

There is a stark dissonance between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and his concrete performance on the border. Peel the current White House’s stump speeches and lurid media blitz, and there is very little substance to differentiate himself from many of his predecessors. Trump talks tough on the border, but even now, lacks the institutional means to back it up with action. While border crossings have seen a plunge since the election, as they did in 2017, with immigrants hesitant to cross the border for fear of being turned away, it can be expected that the PR will eventually disperse. No longer under the awe of a trumped-up media buzz, having flinched but felt no impact, illegal immigrants, both present and future, shall continue to skirt the law. Trump’s own surrogates have indicated this to be the case. Trump’s own sensationally-dubbed “Border Czar” Tom Homan, has admitted ICE lacks the money or infrastructure to gather and detain the millions of illegal immigrants scattered throughout the interior. He has stressed that absent Congressional intervention, the agency must be “realistic” with the “money [they] have,” placing priority on purging America’s streets of the most violent foreigners rather than an indiscriminate approach. The most egregious illegal immigrants, however, are a relative drop in the bucket to the gross majority. However, Homan cannot be blamed for his candor given current constraints. With ICE detention facilities already bursting at 109% overcapacity, at least 461 illegal immigrants have been caught and released back into the country. Disappointed by the current numbers, Trump himself has ordered that ICE raise deportations to a daily quota of 1,800, but this seems to have had little effect. In spite of the present dysfunction beget by a staggering lack of resources, the White House has put forth a reassuring face to throngs of gullible supporters.

The Trump White House’s newly-launched social media presence, taking the form of Rapid Response 47, as well as ICE’s government account, has flooded X with arrest mugshots of the most violent sex offenders, cartel members, and drug dealers to be docked for deportation. They have released intermittent updates on the daily quantity of deportations, which has cratered from 1,179 on January 27th to a pitiful 368 in first days of February. The promised mass deportations of the campaign cycle seem increasingly out of reach. However the base appears not to have noticed this contradiction, stricken by a recurring bout of post-election amnesia that only retires when the other side wins. Some have begun to suggest that mass deportations only referred to the most pernicious offenders to begin with. That breaking into the country would be insufficient to merit deportation sets a concerning implication by itself. It seems the bulk of illegal aliens who are prudent enough to refrain from criminal activity will emerge by the end of Trump’s term, or at least the 2026 midterms, unscathed. The White House’s current deportation projections are on track to meet 1-2 million deportees at most. Despite the flashy showmanship of the Trump team, 2025 is shaping up to be a repeat of 2017 on immigration policy.

What separates this Trump administration, from the first one, is not a disparity in the numbers, but a public approach to sell meager wins as overnight victories. Trump’s reinstatement of executive orders from Remain in Mexico to the deployment of a few thousand of troops has been heralded as a reclamation of American sovereignty, as if the barbarians have not already passed through the gates. ICE is even updating thousands of decades-old arrest briefings on Google, so they rise to the top of search results, creating the perception of mass deportations. Trump’s White House is evidently desperate to make a mountain out of a molehill on deportation policy. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is out patrolling New York City with ICE in full view of the camera, even Dr. Phil is in Chicago catching deportees with immigration agents on TV. The duties of the Trump administration are being magnified by the camera lens, whereas previous administrations, with the exception of Biden, conducted them in the dark.

One must ask about the consequences of tailoring federal immigration policy to public sensibilities. Polling shows that while the 83% of the public supports the deportation of illegal aliens convicted of a violent crime, but this number drops to 43% on the question of deporting all illegal immigrants. The case for removing tattoo-emblazoned Sinaloa and Tren de Aragua members who hail from the slums of Venezuela or Mexico is obvious to all Americans. However, for entire families living illegally in the country for decades, deportations become a harder sell. Unlike hardened criminals and killers, they present no immediate danger beyond the offense that permitted their entry into the country. Tabloid shots of Hispanic teens being dragged out of workplaces and mixed-status households being torn apart by ICE agents would not play well with squeamish voters. Even if ICE summoned the infrastructure and manpower to deport tens of millions overnight, whatever party in power would have little motivation to do so. Yet this raises a dilemma. If a distinction is made between so-“criminal” migrants and their peaceful counterparts, then, by itself, illegal immigration ceases to be illegal. By the state’s apprehension to regard illegal immigrants equally, an implicit standard would be set, if it isn’t already, that American sovereignty is merely a formality. This would ironically permit the most dangerous migrants to slip in among the rest, but more importantly, would render the citizenship of those already here obsolete. Without a show of shock and awe, the crisis will continue unabated. Without the imposition of force, a mandate that has not been flexed on immigration since Eisenhower’s directive in 1954, immigration law can never be normative. Without the anticipation of enforcement, and its proof strung up in the proverbial town-square, law can never be regarded as absolute. Eisenhower’s mass deportations, though smaller in scale at 1–2 million and directed at Mexican nationals, set a momentum that carried through to the 1980s.

The sheer perception that immigration law would be enforced was enough to deter prospective lawbreakers for decades. While decried as “inhumane” by critics, Eisenhower’s militant “Operation Wetback,” which saw masses of Mexicans sent back in overcrowded ships, packed truck beds, and cages, served as a deterrent to prospective lawmakers. Yet, with time, this reminder faded from memory and illegal immigrants crept back across the border. The expectation of enforcement was formally dismantled by President Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which saw 2.7 million illegal immigrants naturalized overnight.

As a result, The 90s saw a flurry of smaller amnesty resolutions. The Section 245(i) amnesty in 1994 pardoned some 578,000 illegal immigrants after being in enacted in 1994. The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act in 1997 granted legal status to a million Central Americans who had entered before 1995. The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act followed in 1998, extending the same to Haitians after claims of discrimination. Then, in 2000, Clinton’s Legal Immigration Family Equity Act provided a path to green cards, further entrenching amnesty as policy. DACA, passed in 2012 by Obama, deferred deportations for 800,000 children brought to the US illegally by their parents. Trump has since signaled an openness to grant them a path to citizenship in exchange for increased border protections.

The border crisis is the inevitable result of decades of legal neglect and political cowardice in enforcing immigration law. The present need for drastic measures, unappealing to many Americans, is merely the consequence of both Republican and Democratic failures to address the issue in a timely manner. The institutional neglect of America’s laws—exemplified by amnesty and paired with an unwillingness to confront the problem—has exacerbated the situation to a point of near unmanageability. No amount of photo ops or feigned outrage can resolve this crisis. Instead, it requires the mobilization of law enforcement—both local and federal—to carry out blanket deportations of all those unlawfully present in the country.

Trump's efforts to pressure Latin American nations into repatriations mark a step in the right direction. However, it is not enough. His administration must take a stand—not in loud rhetoric or symbolic gestures, but in bold action. More critical than the resources needed to enforce immigration laws is the political will to do so. For too long, the country has not only ignored violations of American sovereignty but actively rewarded them. If the current administration, like its predecessors, remains more concerned with appeasing public sentiment than safeguarding the nation's territorial integrity, it will have failed in fulfilling its responsibility to its constituents. Both parties understand that confronting the issue honestly will invite accusations of inhumanity, yet they fail to recognize the inhumanity endured by American citizens. The plight of the foreigner, who proves indifferent to America’s laws, has overshadowed the plight of law-abiding American taxpayer forced to subsidize him to the tune of $150.7 billion. This is an intolerable condition, not just because of its fiscal impact, but because it rips to shred the social contract shared between citizens and the government that professes to represent them. It informs native-born Americans that they have no greater claim to citizenship that newcomers who deny the laws they and their ancestors established. If the White House continues its pacifying approach towards illegal immigration, with no push for mass deportations, it will only have added insult to this grievous injury. 74% of Republicans have taken the bait, believing Trump’s White House to be undoing the damage of the prior administration with sufficient deportations. With Kamala in the Oval Office, they would have at least remained conscious of the still-urgent crisis. Despite the complacency of his supporters, Trump is privately vexed with his administration’s ineptness on deportations, and willing to fix it — to uphold his commitment to voters. Yet encumbered by Republican colleagues who have to win another election and numerous institutional hurdles, changes will prove easier said than done. The window to overturn America’s open-border policy is swiftly narrowing, and without decisive change soon, it may be shut forever.