What do the numbers show about Trump's immigration enforcement record?
- By Reuters -
- Apr 22, 2026
US 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 taking office in 2025.
ARRESTS
Trump won back the White House promising record numbers of deportations. Trump administration budget documents show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
ICE cast a wider net than under former President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, launching broad enforcement sweeps in major US cities and picking up more non-criminals.
Top White House official Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, pressed ICE to escalate operations in mid-2025. Miller set a quota for at least 3,000 arrests per day and told ICE leadership they should target anyone without legal status.
Under the aggressive push, ICE and US Border Patrol agents surged into major cities, sweeping through neighborhoods in search of immigration offenders and clashing with residents.
Federal immigration officers came under scrutiny in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, where officers shot and killed two US citizens.
As public support for Trump’s immigration policies declined, Trump border czar Tom Homan said in late January the agency would move to a more focused approach to enforcement.
The daily average of ICE arrests rose to 1,300 in December 2025, according to agency figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Reuters, far higher than the daily average of 350 over the decade prior to Trump’s second term.
ICE arrests in early March fell to about 1,000 per day, the statistics show, still well above the historic norm.
DETENTION
ICE statistics show the number of people arrested by the agency with no other criminal charges or convictions and then detained rose from about 860 in the month Trump took office to 24,500 as of early February.
Those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions also rose, but at a lower rate.
Following the Trump administration’s decision to dial back its immigration enforcement, the number of people held in detention fell from 68,000 in February to 60,000 in early April, ICE figures show.
A $170 billion immigration enforcement spending package passed by the Republican-controlled US Congress in 2025 provides enough funding to allow ICE to detain more than 100,000 people at a time.
Forty-eight migrants have died in ICE detention since Trump took office, including 17 deaths in 2026, according to the agency.
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.
The number of immigrants deported by ICE rose in the 2025 fiscal year to 443,000, up from 271,000 a year earlier, according to agency budget documents published last week.
DHS stopped issuing detailed statistical reports on immigration enforcement after Trump took office, which makes it challenging to compare Trump’s current term to previous years.
STRIPPING LEGAL STATUS
Trump has moved to strip legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the US legally, creating new groups of people vulnerable to deportation.
His administration has moved to terminate Temporary Protected Status, which allowed migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan to live and work in the US legally. Federal courts have blocked several of the terminations and the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the decisions to end TPS for Haiti and Syria on April 29.
Temporary Protected Status provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the US if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
The Supreme Court in June 2025 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 that granted them work permits.
BORDER SECURITY
The number of migrants caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border fell to the lowest levels in decades after Trump took office and issued a series of executive orders to deter crossings.
His measures built on some initiatives already under way by the end of Biden’s tenure, including a ban on asylum and a push to increase Mexican enforcement.
US Border Patrol caught about 86,000 migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexico border illegally during a one-year period under Trump beginning February 1, 2025, agency figures show.
During the same period a year earlier under Biden, they caught 956,000, reflecting the much higher number of attempted crossings at the time.