Trump Widens Immigration Crackdown After Failing To Meet Deportation Goals
With deportations lagging, the Trump Admin is ramping up immigration crackdowns—expanding its target list, pressuring a short-staffed ICE, and prioritizing performative cruelty over effective policy.
Thank you for reading! In the face of unrelenting disinformation and authoritarian actions, clear truth-telling and independent media are a necessity. If you value in-depth analysis through a pro-democracy lens, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to my newsletter. Paid subscribers empower this work and gain access to exclusive benefits. Your support makes a difference.
President Trump has so far failed to deliver on his promise for the “largest deportation operation in American history.” This is, of course, welcome news to immigrant rights advocates, but to the Trump Administration, it’s sparking a desperate effort to increase deportation numbers with an expanded target list and widening crackdown on immigration.
So far, April is the only month of Trump’s second term in which the Trump Administration deported more immigrants than President Biden did the previous year. In February and March, Trump deported fewer people, according to an NBC News analysis.
This pace is far slower than what would be necessary to deport the million a year that Trump promised to deport.
The slow pace of deportations has become such a big problem within the administration that last week, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly told top ICE officials that they must deport 3,000 people a day, more than tripling their current output.
The problem at the center of Trump’s failure to meet his mass deportations numbers lies within resource constraints at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which we’ll get into later in this article. Also, there simply is no evidence that there are millions of criminal migrants in America. I’ve written extensively about how undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than both legal immigrants and native born citizens.
Trump’s disinformation campaign defaming undocumented immigrants as criminal gang members who are poisoning the blood of our country is easy to push rhetorically, but harder to maintain in enforcement. Trump is running into the reality that there isn’t an invading army of Latino gang members to deport.
In an attempt to deliver the appearance of a mass deportation effort to Trump’s base, the Trump Administration has targeted innocent migrants in high-profile crackdowns that have shocked the nation’s conscience and drawn fierce legal backlash. And it appears they aim to expand their target list and enforcement mechanisms.
Before we touch on the new initiatives, there are countless past examples of these expanded efforts.
In the most widely publicized and most dangerous case, the Trump Administration sent over 200 undocumented immigrants, 75% of whom have no criminal record, to the inhumane Salvadoran mega prison, CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), with absolutely no due process - including Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. This move was, of course, blocked in federal court, and Trump’s broader use of the Alien Enemies Act to pursue further deportation flights of this nature has also been blocked by the Supreme Court as it continues to be litigated in lower courts.
The Trump Administration’s reckless approach to immigration has led to the deportation of U.S. citizen children, including one with cancer. The stories continue to pile up, from innocent families to academics being detained.
Now, they’re doing everything to not only expand deportations, but to keep people out.
Some of the worst signals of the expanding immigration crackdown have come from the State Department. Leading this charge is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is unexpectedly becoming one of Trump’s most extreme Cabinet members.
On Tuesday, the State Department announced that it is halting all interviews for new student visas while it implements a strict social media vetting system. On Wednesday, Rubio said the US would also be aggressively revoking the visas of Chinese students:
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
There are approximately 277,000 Chinese students in the US. It’s not clear exactly how the administration would determine how these students have ties to the Chinese Communist Party or if they will simply be targeted for their nationality.
This comes after the Trump Administration sought to revoke student visas from people who have expressed pro-Palestinian views, targeted Harvard’s funding, and sought to end Harvard’s ability to admit foreign students - a move that has been blocked in federal court.
Cancelling student visa interviews so that the Trump Administration can implement a system where they ideologically screen immigrants, while revoking visas from Chinese students, is incredibly dystopian. With these restrictive moves, the Trump Administration is behaving like the Chinese Communist Party they’re claiming to combat.
Immigrants seeking to study in the US are the kind of immigrants that Republicans have previously claimed to welcome. Highly skilled, highly educated immigrants who will not only become successful members of American society, but they might also become employers themselves. But instead of bringing them in, Trump’s obsession with vindictive attacks on liberal institutions and his desire to make America more homogeneous take priority over America’s interests.
On top of targeting foreign students, a Friday ruling from the right-wing controlled Supreme Court is allowing the Trump Administration to temporarily move forward with its attempt to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) visa program for over 530,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The New York Times published a quantified analysis of the new groups Trump has targeted and the impact on deportation numbers so far.
So, we’ve seen the Trump Administration expand its immigrant target list beyond gang members and immigrants with criminal records, to targeting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants with visas, including students and asylum seekers.
Beyond the expansion of the target list, we’re seeing an expansion of tactics.
The New York Times reported on an initiative by the Trump Administration that is widening in scope - the detainment of immigrants appearing for court hearings:
“Agents have begun arresting migrants immediately after their hearings if they have been ordered deported or their cases have been dismissed, a move that enables their swift removal, according to immigration lawyers and internal documents obtained by The New York Times.
The operations, which have taken place across the country in the past week, have required a high level of coordination between the government lawyers in the courtrooms and the ICE officers waiting to make the arrests, according to the documents.
The tactic is a significant break from past practice, when immigration officials largely steered clear of courthouse arrests out of concern that they would deter people from complying with orders. Critics, including some former homeland security officials, say the practice is deceptive and could backfire.”
This new practice is coming amid resource constraints at ICE.
Top ICE officials have been removed as the agency faces a fresh shakeup this week. The Associated Press reported on the shakeups and ongoing issues with staffing:
“There are a limited number of enforcement and removal officers — those tasked with tracking down, arresting and removing people in the country illegally — and the number of officers has remained stagnant for years. ICE also has a limited number of detention beds to hold people once arrested and a limited number of planes to remove them from the country.”
This limited number of immigration officers is leading the Trump Administration to take drastic measures, seeking to delegate more immigration responsibilities to law enforcement. CNN reports:
“The White House is putting intense pressure on law enforcement agencies across the government to meet a goal of a million deportations a year. That’s led to a surge of agents and officers across the federal government focusing their attention on arrests and deportation efforts – and in some cases straining resources.
At the FBI, hundreds of agents have been reassigned to immigration-related duties, raising concerns among agents that the shift could hinder important national security investigations, including into terror threats and espionage by China and Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Even if they ramp up detention, the problem arises of where to put these migrants. Axios has reported that there are more people in custody than congressionally approved funds were meant to accommodate:
“Immigration officers have almost 49,000 people in ICE custody, according to the latest government data from early May. That's significantly more people in detention than what Congress has appropriated funding to accommodate.”
This is why the Trump Administration is trying to request a huge new package of funding in Trump’s new funding bill, which passed the House but faces hurdles in the Senate.
Trump’s failure to achieve his mass deportation goals is revealing. Not only is it exposing the logistical impossibility of his agenda, but it’s forcing the administration to show the public what their priorities truly are. Rather than focus on dangerous individuals, they’re targeting students, asylum seekers, and law-abiding families to give the illusion of broader action. This isn’t effective policy—it’s performative cruelty with real human consequences.
Thanks for weighing in, Ahmed. It’s all becoming too much, but I have hope that the regime’s incompetence will lead to its downfall.