By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office on January 20, aiming to reduce illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and deport record numbers of immigrants without legal status.
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 surging military troops to assist border security efforts. The Republican president also pressed Mexico and Canada to block more migrants from illegally crossing.
The efforts built on some initiatives already underway at the end of Democratic President Joe Biden’s tenure, including a similar asylum ban and push to increase Mexican enforcement, but appeared to have had immediate results.
U.S. Border Patrol arrested 8,300 migrants at the southern border in February, Trump said on social media over the weekend, the lowest monthly level on record.
Border Patrol’s monthly enforcement statistics go back to 2000. The lowest monthly total on record previously was April 2017, when the agency arrested about 11,100 at the start of Trump’s first term.
Migrant arrests are often used as a proxy to estimate illegal crossings although some migrants also enter undetected.
The February arrest total was a steep drop from the 141,000 migrants picked up in February 2024 and down from 29,000 in January, according to U.S. government figures.
The Trump administration aims to keep illegal crossings low or drive them lower.
The Pentagon recently announced plans to increase its deployment of 10,000 active-duty and National Guard troops at the border. The Republican-led Senate passed a budget resolution in February that would boost spending by $85 billion a year for four years for Trump’s immigration, energy and defense priorities.
ARRESTS AND DETENTION
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that some 11 million immigrants lacked legal status in 2022, a figure some analysts say has climbed to 14 million. Trump said in December that he wanted to deport all immigration law violators.
Trump’s initial executive orders aimed to ramp up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally but yielded mixed results during his first month in office.
Trump rolled back a Biden-era memo that limited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of non-criminals or low-level offenders, emphasizing that anyone without legal status could be subject to arrest and deportation.
At the same time, his administration is pulling employees from ICE’s investigative arm, the Justice Department, the IRS and the State Department to assist with immigration enforcement.
During Trump’s first three weeks in office, ICE arrested about 14,000 people, border czar Tom Homan said last month. That amounts to 667 per day – twice last year’s average but on pace for a quarter million arrests annually – not millions.
ICE arrests spiked to around 800-1,200 per day during Trump’s first week in office, then fell off as detention centers filled up and officers surged to target cities returned home.
Still, ICE has cast a wider net than during Biden’s presidency, picking up more non-criminals and people with final deportation orders, including those who come to ICE offices for routine check-ins.
The number of immigrants without criminal records arrested by ICE and detained rose by 221% from mid-January to mid-February, according to ICE statistics.
ICE detention space remains a limiting factor. ICE data published in late February showed the agency had nearly 44,000 immigrants in detention, beyond its funded level of 41,500.
The private prisons company Geo Group announced last week that it would reopen a 1,000-bed detention facility in New Jersey. CoreCivic, another private prison company, said it would modify ICE contracts to add some 800 additional beds.
The Trump administration also has flown migrants to a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Migrants held there have said they were treated inhumanely and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit over the weekend to stop some possible transfers.
DEPORTATIONS
The Trump administration has struggled to increase deportation levels even as it has opened up new pathways to deport migrants of other nationalities to Mexico and Central America.
Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, Reuters reported in February, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Biden’s administration.
The figures include both ICE “removals” and more informal U.S. Customs and Border Protection “returns” to Mexico.
A senior Trump administration official and experts said deportations were poised to rise in coming months as countries accept more deportees. But initial figures suggested Trump could struggle to match higher deportation rates during the last full year of the Biden administration when large numbers of migrants were caught crossing illegally, making them easier to deport.
The Trump administration has not yet released detailed deportation data that would show how many of those deported were arrested by ICE in the interior of the U.S., as opposed to those arrested at the border and quickly processed for deportation.
The Trump administration rolled back Biden-era extensions of Temporary Protected Status for people from more than 1 million people from Venezuela and Haiti, potentially broadening the pool of people who could be deported.
The Trump administration swiftly struck or expanded agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica to take deportees from other nations. The deportations to Panama have raised concerns about treatment of the migrants, including that of more than 100 sent to a camp near the Darien Gap jungle.
Trump ordered the U.S. military to assist with deportation operations, leading to military deportation flights to Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and India.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Mary Milliken and Chizu Nomiyama)
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