U.S. President Donald Trump implemented over 500 immigration actions in the first year of his second term, resulting in 622,000 deportations, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) revealed on Tuesday. This already surpasses the measures of his entire first administration (2017-2021). According to the MPI report 'Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0', these actions, such as proclamations and regulatory changes, include 38 executive orders on immigration, nearly a sixth of the total 225 decreed since his return to the White House on January 20, 2025. 'If you want to compare, in all four years of Trump 1.0 there were 472 immigration executive orders. It has taken time for the Trump Administration to ramp up law enforcement to redirect that operation inside the country because the focus was on the border where there was a high number of arrivals,' the report states. The Trump administration came with two immigration goals: one is to stop the invasion, as it sees it, at the border, and the other is mass deportations,' stated Muzaffar Chishti, the lead author of the report, at a virtual event. The MPI researcher noted that Trump's actions are 'obsessively driven by wanting to reach the goal of 1 million deportations a year,' but pointed out that the expulsions fell short of this target and of the 778,000 in the last fiscal year of the Joe Biden administration (2021-2025). On average, 1,200 migrants are being apprehended per day by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since January 2025 to mid-December last, with ICE arresting about 595,000 people, the MPI researcher added. The average number of people held in ICE detention centers has also nearly doubled to around 70,000 from the 39,000 at the start of the administration, Chishti added. 'If you look at the profile of the people detained, obviously they are not the worst of the worst. Today, only 26% of those detained have a criminal conviction,' the researcher pointed out. The executive orders have focused on deportations within the country after managing to bring the average monthly migrant encounters at the southern border down to 700, compared to an average of over 80,000 the previous year, according to MPI, which estimates 13.7 million undocumented individuals in the United States. The government has invested $1.3 billion and deployed more than 7,000 troops to border areas it has militarized, reported Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a co-author and associate MPI analyst. Trump's immigration changes have focused on three major areas: rolling back immigration protections granted in the previous administration, accelerating deportations, and increasing cooperation with state and local authorities, explained Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an MPI lawyer and policy analyst. In this regard, she described that a 'conservative' estimate of 1.5 million people have lost their protections so far, as the White House has ordered the elimination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for individuals from 13 countries. The federal government is also seeking 'expedited removals' by denying court hearings, where MPI has identified 4 million pending deportation cases, including about 2.4 million asylum applications. Furthermore, the administration has nearly multiplied '287(g)' agreements, which allow local authorities to cooperate with ICE, by ten, so there are now around 8,500 state and local agents trained to participate in immigration operations. 'It is really important to emphasize that this is just the beginning.'
