US President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, previously unpublished US Department of Homeland Security data show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.
A senior Trump administration official and experts said deportations were poised to rise in coming months as Trump opens up new avenues to ramp up arrests and removals.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said 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 higher deportation rates during the last full year of the Biden administration when 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 sources said.
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.
Trump said in late January that his administration would prepare to detain up to 30,000 migrants there despite pushback from civil liberties groups.
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.
Meanwhile, the administration is moving to make it easier to arrest deportable migrants without criminal records and to detain more people with final deportation orders.
Last month, the Justice Department issued a memo allowing ICE officers to arrest migrants at US immigration courts, rolling back a Biden-era policy that limited such arrests.
On Wednesday, the US State Department designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua and seven other criminal gangs and cartels as terrorist organisations. Under US immigration law, alleged gang members designated as terrorists and people with ties to the groups could become deportable.
“Those are all harder cases,” Vaughan said. “In the case of a worksite operation, you’ve got a lot of planning to do, some investigation that precedes it, all of which takes a lot of time.”
During Trump’s first three weeks in office, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 annually – not millions. ICE arrests spiked to around 800-1,200 per day during Trump’s first week in office, then fell off as detention centers filled up and officers surged to target cities returned home.
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