Tracking Donald Trump’s immigration policy in charts
KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA was not supposed to be sent back to El Salvador. The Salvadoran man came to America illegally around 2011 as a teenager, but had been living and working in Maryland legally since 2019. He is married to an American citizen, has three American children and, with no criminal history, was ostensibly protected from deportation. Yet he is now languishing in a Salvadoran megaprison, one of roughly 200 migrants deported without due process following Mr Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act last month. Sitting in the Oval Office, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, said the idea that he would help return Mr Abrego Garcia to America was “preposterous”. That is despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Trump administration must facilitate his return to the country.
Mr Abrego Garcia’s case exemplifies the aggressive approach to immigration enforcement that Mr Trump is taking in his second term. He has tried to orient the executive branch around the goal of carrying out mass deportations. Attempts to juice up removal numbers by invoking wartime powers such as the Alien Enemies Act and revoking student visas reveals the president’s impatience. The following charts help explain the progress Mr Trump has made so far in cracking down on immigration.
One area where Mr Trump has succeeded is at the border. Migrant encounters have fallen by 96% since they peaked in December 2023, during Joe Biden’s presidency (see chart 1). “What you’re doing with the border is remarkable,” gushed Mr Bukele. In the borderlands, the change has been dramatic. In 2022 the mayor of El Paso, the biggest border city in Texas, declared a state of emergency as migrant shelters overflowed with new arrivals. Now, Border Patrol trucks drive lazily through the foothills that separate El Paso from Mexico. Migrant crossings are vanishingly rare. Yet locals say that things quietened down months before Mr Trump took office. That is reflected in the data: crossings began to fall quickly after Mexico ramped up enforcement and Mr Biden restricted asylum midway through 2024.
The thousands of troops Mr Trump has stationed at the border may also be a deterrent. Some immigrant advocates in El Paso say that would-be migrants are taking a “wait and see” approach to the new administration. Illegal crossings could eventually tick up as coyotes, or smugglers, discover new and perhaps more dangerous smuggling routes.
When Mr Trump returned to office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that carries out deportations, began posting daily immigrant arrest figures on social media. That only lasted for a little more than a week. Some immigration experts speculate that the agency stopped when it became clear that they could not sustain tallies of 1,000 or so arrests a day. An analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration data, suggests that average daily arrests in the first few weeks of Mr Trump’s term were only slightly higher than during Mr Biden’s last year in office.
The president routinely claims that his deportation campaign targets criminals and gang members. But very few of the migrants deported with Mr Abrego Garcia seem to have criminal records, according to an analysis of court records by Bloomberg; several were arrested simply for their tattoos and clothing. Data collected by TRAC indicates that the share of detainees arrested by ICE without any criminal history has increased in recent weeks, further evidence that the administration is prioritising numbers over actual security threats (see chart 2).
Those who have been arrested are now more likely to be detained (see chart 3). Less than 100 days into his term, Mr Trump is running out of places to put people. As of March 23rd, ICE was holding nearly 48,000 migrants. Because limited detention beds can slow deportations, the administration is exploring ways to build more facilities quickly. Tom Homan, Mr Trump’s border czar, has said he wants to roughly double America’s detention capacity, to 100,000 beds. ICE is partnering with private prison firms to reopen old prisons, and is working with the defence department on plans to detain thousands at Fort Bliss, a military base in El Paso.
America’s Sunbelt is also its “detention belt”. Eighteen of the 20 largest detention centres, holding roughly half of all detainees, are located in the south or south-west. “Some of that is because the border is in the south,” says Margo Schlanger, who ran the Department of Homeland Security’s civil-rights and civil-liberties office for Barack Obama. But, she adds, that is less relevant in the Deep South, which does not border Mexico.
The Trump administration may be trying to use the location of these detention centres to its political advantage. Consider the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student in New York who was detained by ICE in March and transported more than 1,000 miles away to the LaSalle detention centre in Louisiana. If the government had got its way (it didn’t) Mr Khalil’s case would have been transferred to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans—the most conservative in the country—and the Trump administration could have expected a friendlier bench. Several other high-profile detainees have also been sent to Louisiana.
Data on deportations are now hard to come by. One imperfect proxy for this is the number of removal flights, which have remained relatively stable since 2022 (see chart 5). It is imperfect because the number of deportees on any given plane can differ, and many migrants are deported by bus, rather than by plane.
Under Mr Biden the Office of Homeland Security Statistics released monthly figures on immigration enforcement, including deportations. But no new data have been published since January. A generous interpretation of the pause is that the Trump administration merely wants to study what data it is releasing, says Austin Kocher, an immigration-enforcement expert at Syracuse University. “A more concerning interpretation”, he adds, is that “they are just yanking data entirely so that there is no way to fact check what the White House says.”■