President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, previously unpublished Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data showed on Friday, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.
A senior administration official said deportations were poised to rise in the coming months as Trump opens up new avenues to ramp up arrests and removals. A DHS spokesperson said that Biden-era deportation numbers appeared “artificially high” because of higher levels of illegal immigration.
Trump campaigned for the White House promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants in the largest deportation operation in US history. Yet initial figures suggest Trump could struggle to match the previous high deportation rates.
During the last full year of the Biden administration, large numbers of migrants were caught crossing illegally, making them easier to deport. The deportation effort could take off in several months, aided by agreements from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica to take deportees from other nations.
The US military has assisted in more than a dozen military deportation flights to Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and India. The Trump administration has also flown Venezuelan migrants to the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.
The military-assisted deportations could grow considering the Pentagon’s vast budget and ability to surge resources, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert with the Washington Office on Latin America think tank.
Expanding deportations
Meanwhile, the administration is moving to make it easier to arrest deportable migrants without criminal records. Under US immigration law, alleged gang members designated as terrorists and people with ties to the groups could become deportable.
The Trump administration is also pulling agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigative arm, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the State Department to assist with arrests and investigations.
Jessica Vaughan, a policy director at the Centre for Immigration Studies, which favours lower levels of immigration, said those investigative agents could help crack down on employers, who hire workers without legal status and people who have final deportation orders.
During Trump’s first three weeks in office, ICE arrested about 14,000 people, border czar Tom Homan said last week. That amounts to 667 per day – twice last year’s average but on pace for a quarter million arrests annuallynot millions.
