President Donald Trump’s big goal to reduce border crossings from Mexico is showing remarkable success. The number of tracked illegal crossings at the southern border has been rapidly decelerating — the 7,181 illegal crossings in March marked the lowest total since Border Patrol started releasing monthly statistics in 2000, according to Reuters.
However, what is obscuring this remarkable success is the controversy surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s snatch-and-grab operations and the rent-a-prison in El Salvador, along with a half dozen other countries accepting deportees. There are signs in many directions that the Trump mass deportation initiative is becoming a difficult and increasingly unpopular grind.
“By moving the goalposts from ‘border security’ to a sort of ongoing ethnic-cleansing operation with all the legal and constitutional issues it raises, the Trump administration is stepping on its original message and setting itself up for failure,” explained Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council in MSN.
When Trump returned to power, his administration instituted arrest quotas for ICE, with a goal of hitting a million deportations during his first year. So far, it hasn’t come close to meeting this aggressive goal.
Based on Federal Register notices and selective information shared with news organizations, it appears on track to deport roughly half a million people this year — fewer than the 685,000 deportations recorded in fiscal year 2024 under then-President Joe Biden.
Trump can certainly ramp up deportations to a level never before seen in this country; however, rounding up all 11 million undocumented people and sending them back to their countries of origin is not politically, legally, and logistically possible.
One of the major logistical problems is that ICE has around 21,000 employees, including agents and non-law enforcement personnel. Experts say that is nowhere near enough personnel to track down undocumented people on the scale Trump has talked about.
ICE officials have allegedly been told to escalate the number of people they arrest from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, forcing each of the 25 field offices to make around 75 arrests daily.
To make these numbers, ICE is pursuing workplace immigration raids (a policy Biden ended), getting illegals with no criminal records, targeting people at day labor sites, churches, schools, shopping areas, and processing those stopped for minor traffic violations.
There’s also a historic backlog with more than 3.7 million cases in the 71 immigration courts and adjudication centers nationwide managed by about 700 immigration judges. The Trump administration laid off or received resignations from over 100 court staff and fired over 20 judges who hear 500 to 700 cases per year.
To circumvent the back-logged immigration courts, Trump has signed 181 immigration-specific executive actions, a six-fold increase over the same period in his first term, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
These include declaring a national emergency at the Mexico-U.S. border in order to deploy the military, ending the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship, halting refugee admissions into the U.S., and ending the CBP One app program, which allowed undocumented migrants to submit information and schedule appointments at the southern border.
Now, instead of prioritizing hardened criminals as in the “worst first” strategy, the Trump administration seems to be valuing speed, volume, and spectacle over everything else. It is showing blatant contempt for the law and the Constitution by willingly opting out of due process — a right guaranteed to all citizens and non-citizens by the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
Trump has not ruled out reinstating his first-term policy of separating families at the border, and many U.S. citizens will have their families split up if he carries out his mass deportation plans. The U.S has an estimated 4.7 million mixed-status households with both undocumented residents and residents with permanent legal status.
About 13 million noncitizens currently have permanent legal status (i.e., possess a green card). About 9 million of them are eligible to become citizens because they’ve been permanent residents for at least five years, or because they’ve been married to a citizen for at least three years.
Under Trump, federal agents have shifted into maximum enforcement mode in order to fulfill the president’s goal of mass deportation. They have been detaining permanent U.S. residents convicted of years-old minor offenses and moving to deport them, according to The New York Times.
His Department of Homeland Security enacted mass firings to three key offices that oversee civil rights protections across its broad mission. They investigate complaints about the agency’s mission and immigration system and recommend changes as necessary, and make sure immigration detention facilities are safe and secure.
In the meantime, Trump insists on fighting the courts over deportations (like that of Kilmar Abrego García) and glorying in the humiliation and even torture of terrified-looking immigrants with no record of violent crime. Immigrants deserve sensible, humane policies that carve fair pathways to permanent legal status and citizenship.
“The visceral appeal of mass deportation — the political theater of ‘cleaning house’ — is giving way to unease about its consequences: families torn apart, children left behind, labor shortages, legal chaos, and international condemnation,” wrote David Greenwald in Vanguard.
“And for many Americans, it’s now clear that deportation as a policy solution is not only morally fraught — it’s also ineffective. The days of using ‘public opinion’ as a blunt weapon to justify mass deportation may be coming to an end,” Greenwald concluded.
PS: The Trump administration planned to deport a group of Asian immigrants to Libya, a country racked with conflict whose network of migrant detention centers are “horrific” and “deplorable.” Libya’s two rival governments did not agree to accept them, which would have been in violation of their sovereignty. A federal judge ruled this action was in violation of a court order he issued in March, creating a legal impediment to a sharp escalation of President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Dr. William Kolbe, an Andover resident, is a retired high school and college teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga and El Salvador. He can be reached at bila.kolbe9@gmail.com.