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Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport undocumented immigrants with criminal records. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack legal immigrants, too. In our new series, Who Gets to Be American This Week?, we’ll track the Trump administration’s attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.
In Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, his administration grabbed headlines for going to extremes on deportations—targeting students and permanent residents, and invoking a 200-year-old law to rush migrants out of the country without due process and send them to a Salvadoran prison.
All this might lead you to think he’s following through on his campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the U.S.
But the administration isn’t carrying out deportations on anything close to the scale it promised, according to some think tanks that analyzed available immigration data for the president’s first 100 days in office. And the scramble to boost Trump’s deportation numbers seems to be pushing immigration officials to get sloppy; they’ve removed multiple children who are U.S. citizens from the country in recent weeks. But true to form, the Trump administration is hoping the Supreme Court will come to its rescue. Will a monarchical court allow a monarchical executive branch to continue lawless deportations?
Here’s the immigration news we’re keeping an eye on this week:
Trump Isn’t Doing What He Promised on Deportations
The Trump administration is aiming to deport 1 million immigrants this year, according to the Washington Post—and despite the administration’s extreme, lawless methods, a look at the numbers suggests that goal is far out of reach. Looking at all of Trump’s immigration actions since he took office on Jan. 20, the Brookings Institution concluded that there’s been “more arrests, less due process, but not yet more deportations.”
One major reason is that the volume of people attempting to cross U.S. ports of entry has drastically dropped, largely because of the president’s executive order that effectively ended all parole and humanitarian programs that previously allowed migrants to lawfully enter the U.S. This group used to be the bulk of deportations under former administrations, but now that it has sharply declined under Trump, immigration authorities are forced to find immigrants wherever they may be located within the country—a much more complicated task.
The Migration Policy Institute also noted there are a limited number of detention beds across the country, and once immigrants are on U.S. soil, they can assert their legal rights and fight a deportation action.
NBC News calculated that in February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 11,000 migrants, and just over 12,300 in March. MPI says those figures are higher than the monthly pace of removals during Trump’s first term, when he deported 6,800 noncitizens per month, but still lower than former president Barack Obama’s, when ICE deported about 12,900 noncitizens per month. All in all, MPI believes the Trump administration’s current pace of deportations could lead to only about 500,000 immigrants being removed from the country in 2025, far below the president’s 1 million goal and even below the Biden administration, which deported 685,000 migrants in fiscal year 2024.
On the other hand, immigration arrests have doubled under Trump 2.0 compared to in fiscal year 2024, according to MPI, jumping up to about 650 per day as of mid-March. ICE’s detention capacity has also increased from 41,500 beds in fiscal year 2024 to 54,500 as of March, leaning on detention centers across the country, particularly in Louisiana.
Citizens Are Being Caught Up in a Rushed Deportation Push
Immigration officials’ frenzied efforts to achieve the president’s deportation goals have swept up multiple U.S. citizens in recent months, including a 4-year-old who was undergoing cancer treatment.
In March, the federal government was accused of violating immigration law in Chicago, where at least one U.S. citizen was unlawfully targeted. Julio Noriega is a 54-year-old who was born and raised in Chicago but was arrested during an ICE raid and held in detention overnight. In April, U.S. citizen Jose Hermosillo, who is from New Mexico, was arrested while visiting friends in Arizona. He was held in detention for nine days until his family provided his U.S. birth certificate and Social Security card. Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez is a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. and was arrested in Florida after being wrongfully charged with being an “unauthorized alien.” He was detained for 48 hours until a judge verified his U.S. birth certificate.
And last week, a family of U.S. citizens who recently moved from Maryland to Oklahoma awoke to about 20 armed federal agents knocking on their door in the middle of the night. The mother of three daughters told local news that she tried explaining to the agents that they were all citizens and that they had the wrong house, as the agents’ search warrant listed the names of the home’s previous tenants. Yet the agents proceeded to tear through the family’s home confiscating their belongings, including phones, laptops, and their cash savings, claiming it was necessary for “evidence.”
In Louisiana, ICE agents also recently deported two noncitizen mothers with their U.S. citizen children to Honduras. One of the mothers was forced out of the country with both of her children, one of whom was 4 years old and undergoing treatment for Stage 4 cancer. Their attorney told NBC News that ICE was aware that the child was sick and a U.S. citizen, yet the child was deported without medication. Agents also did not allow the mother to speak with her attorney or family before being deported. The other mother deported with her 2-year-old U.S. citizen child was barely given time to speak with the child’s father before an ICE officer hung up the phone, according to their attorney.
In recent administrations, about 1 percent of all those detained by immigration agents have been actually U.S. citizens, Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, explained to the Wall Street Journal. Under Trump’s mass deportation agenda, she believes that number will increase.
“They don’t care about our Constitution and they are determined to try to detain and deport as many brown and Black people as they possibly can,” Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, told MSNBC back in February.
Temporary Protected Status Program Goes to the Supreme Court
Since 1990, temporary protected status has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to live and work in the U.S. without threat of deportation, but Trump tried to end the program shortly after taking office.
Congress created TPS back in 1990, and it allows citizens of certain countries suffering from natural disasters or war—including Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine, and Lebanon—to enter the U.S. and work here without threat of deportation. Each country stays on the TPS list for a period of 18 to 24 months, at which point the government must determine whether it will extend TPS protections. Right before leaving office, former president Biden extended TPS for nearly 1 million immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan that will carry them through fall 2026—unless Trump gets his way.
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