Trump’s return to office has seen sweeping changes to immigration enforcement
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump promoted his immigration and border security record during his State of the Union address, highlighting how the number of migrants arriving at the southern border plummeted since he returned to office in January 2025.
But he made scant mention of the fallout from enforcement operations in places such as Minneapolis and Chicago, where residents demonstrated against tactics by federal officers. Two U.S. citizens were shot and killed in Minneapolis in January, leading to widespread opposition to the operation and more broadly how immigration officers were fulfilling their mandate from the Republican president.
“Today our border is secure,” Trump told Congress in his speech Tuesday night. “We now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far. In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.”
Immigration has long been Trump’s signature issue and a top reason he won a second term in 2024. His first year back in the White House saw sweeping changes in enforcement and an infusion of billions of dollars to the agencies tasked with carrying out his agenda. That is reshaping how enforcement will look for the rest of Trump’s tenure, from the number of immigrants detained to how few are winning asylum cases.
Here’s a look at how his administration has performed when it comes to six key immigration indicators.
Declining border arrests
While Joe Biden was president, Republicans constantly pointed to the flow of migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as a crisis that they blamed on the Democrat.
The number of people arrested trying to enter the U.S. illegally hit a high of nearly 250,000 in December 2023 and then started to fall throughout the rest of Biden’s term.
In December 2024, the last full month before Trump was sworn in, the number of arrests was at a little over 46,000. By February 2025, it was less than 8,000 and has stayed around that level or lower since. It was 6,070 in January.
Skyrocketing arrests by ICE
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement promised a new era of enforcement, loosening restrictions placed on those who could be arrested and removed. The result was a spike in ICE arrests.
In December 2024, ICE recorded 8,507 arrests. In 2025, that climbed to 17,000 by February, neared 30,000 by June and reached 32,771 by September, according to information gathered by the University of California, Berkeley’s, Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press. The last release of data was from the middle of October, before the Minneapolis crackdown.
The number of people in detention is growing
As the number of arrests has surged, so has the number of immigrants being held in ICE’s network of detention facilities across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security is receiving $45 billion to build, buy or rent new facilities to house immigrants who have been arrested and not yet deported.
ICE releases information every two weeks on the number of people in their facilities. That number fluctuates daily as people are brought into the system or let out, either because they are released on bond — an increasingly rare occurrence — or because they’re deported.
In December 2024, the average daily detention numbers hovered just under 40,000 people. Under Trump, it has climbed dramatically. The number reached 70,000 by February of this year. With the money ICE now has, the agency eventually can detain around 100,000 immigrants or more.
When it comes to immigration enforcement, lots of money to spend
ICE received $45 billion in new money from Congress to step up immigration enforcement and border security, and it has been on a spending spree. It has been trying to rent or buy more space to detain immigrants and working with conservative states to open facilities with catchy names such as “Alligator Alcatraz” or “Speedway Slammer.”
Roughly $30 billion is going toward hiring 10,000 deportation officers. An additional $46 billion is for finishing the border wall that Trump promised during his first term. More money is being used for such things as hiring more Customs and Border Protection officers and bolstering immigration courts.
A tougher time getting asylum
The number of immigrants seeking asylum after arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has ballooned in recent years, leading to massive backlogs in immigration courts.
Increasingly, those people are seeing their cases rejected under the Trump administration.
According to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the percentage of asylum applicants who ultimately saw their applications denied in court ranged from a high of 60% to a low of 40% in the years before Trump’s first term. They then climbed every year that Trump was in office before falling again during the Biden administration.
But according to the data, asylum rejection rates jumped by 22.5% during the first year of Trump’s second term.
Is it really ‘the worst of the worst’?
The Trump administration has repeatedly portrayed its mass deportation efforts as a way to get rid of immigrants who have committed crimes or are a danger to society, calling them “the worst of the worst.”
But data from the Deportation Data Project shows that the percentage of people arrested by ICE with criminal histories has been going down steadily.
Just before Trump took office, about 86% of the arrests that ICE made were for people with criminal backgrounds — meaning they had been convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S. separate from entering the country illegally, which is a civil offense.
That has been in decline, and as of mid-October about 55% had a criminal background while 45% did not. Critics point out that if someone has been arrested for a crime, it does not necessarily mean that person committed a serious felony such as murder. It’s often minor crimes like shoplifting.
Part of the reason is that immigration enforcement officers are making more collateral arrests. When ICE pursues a specific target who may have a criminal record, officers can arrest others they come across as long as those people are in the country illegally.
Historically, most of the people ICE arrested have been transferred from state or local jails and prisons. ICE still does that, but under the Trump administration the agency also is using other tactics to bolster arrest numbers. That includes raiding worksites or targeting people showing up for their immigration court dates or when they show up for their regular check-ins with the agency.