Debating Who Gets Deported
The Trump administration has made significant progress in cleaning up the illegal immigration mess the Biden administration left, but there is still much work to be done.
It has been roughly 10 months since Donald Trump returned to the White House. And one of Trump’s top priorities since returning is cleaning up Joe Biden’s open-border disaster.
An estimated 10-14 million illegal border crossings occurred under Biden’s sleepy watch, aided by his administration through a variety of legally dubious gambits.
Thankfully, the Trump administration, led by Border Czar Tom Homan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has acted swiftly and decisively to both shut down the southern border and reverse the flow of illegal aliens.
By July of this year, the total number of illegal border crossings for the month set a new record low, at just 4,598. To put that in perspective, in July 2024, the number of illegal crossings was 56,400, and in July 2023, it was 132,642.
For fiscal year 2025, the Border Patrol arrested 238,000 migrants illegally crossing, a 50-year low. And if the trend continues — which the indicators suggest — the number of illegal border crossings will likely set a new low next year.
But shutting down the flow of illegal migrants is arguably the easier task. Getting them removed from the U.S. is much more challenging and generates far more controversy.
Here too, however, the Trump administration has seen impressive success, albeit the proverbial row is getting harder to hoe.
More than two million illegal aliens have exited the country thus far. An estimated 1.6 million illegals have self-deported. The Trump administration has encouraged self-deportation by repurposing the CBP Home app, which offers illegal aliens a $1,000 stipend and a free flight to their home country if they willingly sign up. Furthermore, self-deporters preserve the possibility of legally returning to the U.S. at some point in the future and can avoid being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The $1,000 stipend and free flight have actually significantly reduced taxpayers’ costs for immigration enforcement. “Currently, the average cost to arrest, detain, and remove an illegal alien is $17,121,” DHS reports.
Meanwhile, ICE officers have been busy locating and arresting known criminal illegal aliens, 527,000 of whom have been deported so far. Furthermore, an additional 700,000 criminal foreign nationals are currently in ICE detention awaiting deportation.
If the current rate of self-deportation and ICE deportations does not increase, however, nearly half the total number of illegal aliens that entered the U.S. during the Biden administration will still be residing here after Trump’s term is up.
This reality has caused some disagreement and division within the Trump administration. On one side is Homan and ICE Director Todd Lyons, who favor a continued primary focus on arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens. On the other side are Noem, senior advisor Corey Lewandowski, and Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino. They want to cast a wider net, arresting and deporting illegal aliens irrespective of whether or not they have a criminal record. They’re looking at the overall deportation numbers and want them to increase significantly in order to rapidly shrink the overall population of illegal aliens.
Homan sees this focus as effectively playing into the current false Democrat and Leftmedia narrative that ICE is focused simply on deporting illegal aliens writ large.
As one senior DHS official observed, “ICE started off with the worst of the worst, knowing every target they are hitting, but since Border Patrol came to LA in June, we’ve lost our focus, going too hard, too fast, with limited prioritization. It’s getting numbers, but at what cost?”
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ rhetoric regarding immigration enforcement has only gotten more extreme, with ICE officers regularly being smeared as “Nazis” and the “Gestapo.” This rhetoric has resulted in a 1,000% increase in the number of assaults against ICE officers and an 8,000% rise in the number of death threats directed at ICE personnel.
The troubling growth in opposition to ICE will only make the removal of illegal aliens that much more challenging. And should it appear that an increasing number of non-criminal illegal aliens are being arrested and deported, public support for Trump’s efforts will likely quickly erode.
