Donald Trump promised during the 2024 campaign to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He's gotten off to a pretty good start, all things considered.
In the first 100 days, the administration has deported 142,000 illegal aliens. That's about 10% less than Biden's numbers from last year.
However, in politics, perception is everything. Trump's campaign promise, along with high-profile ICE raids, has created the perception that Trump's crackdown on illegal immigrants is far greater than Biden's.
Have we already forgotten open-borders advocates calling Biden "Deporter in Chief"? The reason is simple: During the Biden administration, illegal alien entries into the United States averaged 200,000 a month during 2021-23.
The flip side of that is the border patrol apprehended 7,181 individuals crossing the southwest border in March 2025 between ports of entry, a 14% decrease from February 2025 and a 95% decrease from March 2024.
Trump has concentrated on catching and deporting illegal alien criminals and recent arrivals. Apprehensions at the border are down 95%, reflecting the president's tough talk on border security and an increase in border patrols. Traffic through the infamous Darien Gap in Panama was down 99%.
The reason Biden was able to deport more illegal aliens is because there were many thousands more showing up at the border expecting to be let in. That practice has ended.
The only way to deport large numbers of people is to find them in towns and cities where they have historically congregated. That's proving to be a lot harder and slower than anticipated.
The reason is the federal courts.
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.”
There have been four major Supreme Court decisions on illegal aliens granting them some constitutional rights of due process, equal protection, and deportation.
In plain language, this means that, at the very least, illegal aliens have the right to a hearing before being sent home, according to the lower courts. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this way, meaning the Alien Enemies Act, as the administration is broadly applying it, may not stand.
There are other obstacles to fulfilling Trump's "One Million Illegals Deported" goal. Perhaps the most immediate challenge is that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is woefully understaffed.
“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.
Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" will give $8 billion to hire 10,000 ICE agents and more than double immigration detention capacity to 10,000 beds.
However, the biggest obstacle remains local sanctuary city policies and the non-cooperation of local law enforcement. The administration has talked of arresting people like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and ICE actually arrested a Milwaukee judge for actively hiding an illegal immigrant who was set to be deported. But the only way there will be a large number of illegals deported will be with the cooperation of local law enforcement and the non-interference of city leaders.
Another big challenge is finding the millions of illegals who came to the U.S., were assigned court dates, and then just melted into the background.
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.”
But the Biden immigration policy posed no threat to the national security of the U.S., right?
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