By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump has stepped up arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally, cracked down on unlawful border crossings and stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants since taking office in 2025.
ARRESTS
Trump won back the White House promising record numbers of deportations. A Trump administration budget document published last year said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aimed to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
ICE has cast a wider net than under then-President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, launching broad enforcement sweeps in major U.S. cities and picking up more non-criminals.
From January 1, 2025 – October 15, 2025, ICE arrested an average of 746 people per day, according to ICE figures obtained by the Deportation Data Project, more than double the average over the past decade.
Still, the pace of arrests remained short of what Trump would need to deport millions of people.
Top White House official Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, pressed ICE to escalate operations in mid-2025. Miller set a quota for at least 3,000 arrests per day and told ICE leadership they should target anyone without legal status.
Under the aggressive push, ICE and U.S. Border Patrol agents surged into major U.S. cities, sweeping through neighborhoods in search of immigration offenders and clashing with residents.
Federal immigration officers came under scrutiny in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, where officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens, and support for Trump’s immigration policies has fallen.
DETENTION
ICE statistics show the number of people arrested by the agency with no other criminal charges or convictions and then detained rose from about 860 when Trump took office to 24,500 as of early February.
Those arrested and detained with criminal charges or convictions also rose, but at a lower rate.
ICE had more than 68,000 immigrants in custody as of early February. A $170 billion immigration enforcement spending package passed by the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress in 2025 provides enough funding to allow ICE to detain more than 100,000 people at a time.
DEPORTATIONS
The Trump administration has struggled to increase deportation levels even as it has opened new pathways to send migrants to countries other than their home country.
The Department of Homeland Security said there were more than 675,000 deportations during Trump’s first year in office, similar to figures during Biden’s last two years in office.
However, many more migrants were crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally under Biden and then quickly deported while Trump’s enforcement has focused on people already living in the U.S.
DHS stopped issuing detailed statistical reports on immigration enforcement after Trump took office, which makes it challenging to know how the department tallied the numbers.
STRIPPING LEGAL STATUS
Trump has moved to strip legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. legally, creating new groups of people vulnerable to deportation.
His administration has moved to terminate Temporary Protected Status, which allowed migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan to live and work in the U.S. legally. Federal courts have blocked several of the terminations, in legal battles that could eventually head to the Supreme Court.
Temporary Protected Status provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the U.S. if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
The Supreme Court in June 2025 let the Trump administration proceed with stripping legal status from half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who entered under a Biden-era “parole” program that granted them work permits.
In recent months, the Trump administration launched efforts to re-vet refugees and asylum seekers allowed into the U.S. under Biden. A memo issued last week gave ICE more authority to detain legal refugees who had been in the United States for a year and do not yet have permanent residency.
BORDER SECURITY
The number of migrants caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border fell to the lowest levels in decades after Trump took office and issued a series of executive orders to deter crossings.
His measures built on some initiatives already under way by the end of Biden’s tenure, including a ban on asylum and a push to increase Mexican enforcement.
U.S. Border Patrol caught about 86,000 migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally during a one-year period under Trump beginning February 1, 2025, agency figures show.
During the same period a year earlier under Biden, they caught 956,000, reflecting the much higher number of attempted crossings at the time.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Ben Kellerman, Jason Lange, Kristina Cooke and M.B. Pell; Editing by Mary Milliken, Chizu Nomiyama, Howard Goller, Matthew Lewis, Alexandra Hudson and Jonathan Oatis)
