April 18, 2025 - 4:00pm
Donald Trump has been back in office for less than three months, and already the immigration landscape has shifted dramatically. According to a March report from the New York Post, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested more than 113,000 immigrants and deported over 100,000 since 20 January — nearly 1,430 per day. The message is simple: leave now, or face removal with jail time.
That’s a staggering reversal from the Joe Biden years, when enforcement all but collapsed. From October 2022 through September 2024, the ICE deported just 313,630 illegal immigrants, averaging only 287 per day. Meanwhile, it released 503,690 immigrants, an average of 460 per day, into the interior on orders of supervision, parole, or their own recognisance. Trump’s ICE is deporting 150% more people per day than Biden’s average across his last three years in office.
Now compare that to Barack Obama’s tenure. Between 2009 and 2016, the “deporter-in-chief” deported approximately 3.2 million individuals, peaking at 438,421 removals in 2013, or about 1,201 per day. Today, Trump’s enforcement pace surpasses Obama’s peak by nearly 19%.
The current administration is invoking Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, known as the “Take Care” Clause, enforcing laws which previous presidents ignored. Elsewhere, the Trump administration has reopened the VOICE Office, giving families of Americans harmed or killed by illegal immigrants a direct line to resources, case updates, and recognition. Under Biden, this process was dismantled and the criminal was prioritised. Now, it’s the citizen.
ICE data shows that more than 650,000 criminal illegal immigrants are now on the agency’s “non-detained docket”, meaning they’re living freely in communities. Among them are 14,944 accused or convicted of homicide, over 20,000 for sexual assault, and more than 100,000 for other violent crimes. For the first time, ICE is threatening civil penalties for migrants who defy removal orders. Foreign nationals who are in the US for more than 30 days must now register or face imprisonment, as required under federal law. These are not new laws, simply existing ones being enforced.
Yet this effort is being met with resistance not just from activist city governments, but from inside the courts. Judges in New York and Texas are now attempting to block the President from using wartime authorities such as the Alien Enemies Act to deport criminal foreign nationals from hostile regimes. This is happening even after the Supreme Court vacated an earlier injunction and reaffirmed that challenges to removal must go through habeas corpus. Activist judges are seeking to nullify immigration powers with which they disagree, despite these powers having existed since the ratification of the Constitution.
In response, Trump is doubling down on international cooperation. This week, he praised El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on his visit to the White House. Bukele’s government recently accepted 238 Venezuelans accused of gang affiliations. But the partnership hit turbulence over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident recently deported to El Salvador.
Despite a Supreme Court order directing the US to facilitate Garcia’s return, Bukele refused. The Department of Homeland Security identifies Garcia as a member of the terrorist organisation MS-13, with multiple charges and encounters in the US, including trafficking. This situation underscores the complexities at the intersection of US immigration enforcement, judicial mandates, and international diplomacy.
The scale of the challenge is enormous. There are an estimated 1.4 million illegal immigrants in the US with final orders of removal. Millions more are either embedded in communities or shielded by local sanctuary policies, bureaucratic apathy, or simple political inertia.
In recognition of this fact, on 20 January Trump signed Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, and issued a presidential proclamation formally invoking Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution. Together, these measures redefined immigration enforcement as a matter of national defence. Three days later, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security declared a “mass influx of aliens”, authorising state and local law enforcement to carry out the duties of ICE officers. States now have an unprecedented legal authority to act. But will they?
Florida has answered the call. Governor Ron DeSantis has unified his state’s entire public safety apparatus under the Florida State Board of Immigration Enforcement. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has voiced clear support for Trump’s effort. “I have ordered Texas state agencies to assist the Trump Administration with arresting, jailing, and deporting illegal immigrants,” he said back in February. The President’s executive actions must be codified — through Congress, through bills like the SAVE Act, and through state legislation that mandates full cooperation with ICE.
The road ahead won’t be easy. Bureaucratic resistance, activist litigation, and political gamesmanship will continue. But if the US is to restore the rule of law and the meaning of citizenship itself, there should be a bipartisan alignment on the process Trump has started. Citizenship, as historian Victor Davis Hanson reminds us, is a rare and sacred concept. Without swift action, it will be replaced by a borderless bureaucracy that serves no one but itself.
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SubscribeNeed I say this is a very different take than the constant hang wringing I keep reading g
Does anyone else find it odd that US politicians, Democrats in particular (and bureaucratic drones) care more about illegal aliens that American Citizens – and not by a little bit?
I noticed this about 25 years ago. Can any of you explain this?
My theory is that leftism got together with globalisation and the b*****d child was an unstoppable drive to fight for the underprivileged worldwide, rather than your own underprivileged citizens. Even if that commitment results in you alienating the underprivileged citizens whose interests your party was founded to protect.
I other words, a clear case of an originally positive principle being extrapolated to utter absurdity and damage.
Seems to mirrors the evolution of Stonewall from gay rights to excessive trans rights.
They don’t yet know they’re “deplorables”.
Some of them do seem to turn out that way!
One can think of it as an insider/outsider problem: Outsiders want to become insiders, but newly-minted insiders want to keep outsiders outside.
I cannot. If their votes are any indication, most Democrats also care more about a handful of males who demand to be recognized as female than they do all actual girls and women. Their topsy-turvy world confounds the sane.
Over the last year, a few elected officials revealed part of the calculus: Non-citizens, whether illegal immigrants or legal, permanent residents, get counted in the population census. The greater a state’s population, the greater that state’s representation in the Congress. So, more illegal immigrants, more seats in Congress.
It’s just shear opportunism. These people do not care about the integrity of citizenship or of the country.
This matter intersected with the Supreme Court opinion in US Department of Commerce v. New York (2019). The Court ruled 5-4 that the Trump Administration could not require census takers in the 2020 census to indicate residents’ citizenship status. The Court did not rule on the substance of the matter but found a way of avoiding it by appealing to a heavy interpretation of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Did enforcement “collapse” during Biden’s tenure? To me it seemed more like a wilfully hands off approach, aided and abetted by, among others, the Associated Press who discouraged the use of words like “crisis” to describe the situation at the border when it was a fair description: https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/behind-the-news/describing-whats-happening-at-the-us-border/
Compare to Europe, where we’ve been referring to a migrant/refugee crisis for at least 10 years. At this point, I think we should just refer to “migration” as a “crisis” is a problem which is acute and overwhelming for a brief time and 10 years is no longer a short period. But we never knotted our knickers about saying “crisis”.
Did enforcement collapse?
Indeed, it did, but the approach was not laissez-faire. It was militantly hands-on:
Give the appearance of illegal immigration being legal by actually processing illegal immigrants in Mexico; Give them airline flights straight into cities around the United States; Provide them with smartphones, money, work permits, Social Security numbers (and thus access to services including healthcare), …
All well and good, but Mr. Trump needs to separate himself from those on his side of the aisle who are acting and speaking from ethnic animosity. It’s been a constant refrain in America: “No Irish!”, “No Wops!”, “No Chinese!” And in the end those bigots always wind up looking like angry idiots. Most of us belong to one of those once-prohibited groups.
It’s past time to start looking forward. Trump’s agenda, which I still have high hopes for, depends on success in the mid-term congressional elections. Without Congress he won’t accomplish anything. The Dems are just sitting and waiting for him to go too far. The cruelty and hostility toward the illegals (especially the women and children), which so pleases his most troglodytic base, is not helping. Now is not the time to be pushing his more centrist voters away.
Isnt the category
It’s easy to start off strong. Need to see the numbers again after 1 year to see if the momentum is sustained. And if they’ve deported the right people.