100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a Failure

Deportation statistics and poll numbers both say so.

Trump shows immigration charts during the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

DURING THE 2024 CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” on his first day in office, telling Time “15 million and maybe as many as 20 million people” could be rounded up and shipped off.

And when he returned to power, Trump’s administration instituted arrest quotas for ICE, with a goal of hitting one million deportations during his first year.

So far, it has been a failure.

By the end of March, Trump will have overseen 113,000 arrests and 100,000 deportations, according to the highest estimates available. While those figures may earn breathless coverage in Trump-allied outlets like the New York Post, they are nowhere near on pace for his stated goals. Furthermore, they may be dubious.

“That 100,000 number at the end of March can not be correct,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council told me. ICE made just 656 arrests on average per day during the first fifty days of the administration. To achieve 113,000 arrests by the end of March, the average rate of arrests would have had to leap up by a factor of six—to more than 3,800 arrests every day—for the rest of the month.

These figures look even more fishy when you take into account that U.S. Border Patrol reported apprehending a total of only 15,527 migrants at the border in February and March. Even if you were to add together the figures for these border patrol arrests and the ICE arrests, you still wouldn’t reach a number of arrests that makes the statistic of 100,000 deportations plausible.

Of course, in politics—especially Trump’s kind of politics—facts don’t matter as much as people’s perceptions.¹ Trump’s immigration policies will succeed or fail depending on whether Americans view them as improving their lives. And there’s reason to think that Americans who wanted Trump to impose order on what they saw as a disorganized and anarchic immigration system instead see his immigration policies as contributing to chaos.

This week a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on immigration for the first time, with 46 percent disapproving of his actions on the issue, compared to 45 percent approving. That was followed by a Economist/YouGov poll showing Trump with a net -5 percent approval on immigration, with a surprising 49 percent plurality calling his approach to immigration “too harsh.” (Sam Stein and Andrew Egger broke down these polls in detail—check it out.)

The same poll found that 50 percent of respondents believed Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, should be returned to the United States while only 28 percent said he shouldn’t be.

That finding aligned with a Data for Progress poll, which found nearly 6 in 10 likely voters believe the government should only deport people if it has provided evidence in a court hearing, while 39 percent said it should be allowed to deport people without hearings.

“What is remarkable about Trump’s first 100 days is that he took the two issues he was strongest on—the economy and immigration—and completely destroyed his credibility on both,” Kristian Ramos, a Democratic consultant who studies Latinos and the economy, told The Bulwark.

Ramos argued that what was getting lost in the analysis of these polling trends is that they were actually interrelated. The economy, he stressed, works best when the U.S. is integrating immigrants and allowing them to contribute through their labor and tax revenue, rather than hunting down taxpaying immigrants through IRS data.

“What [Trump is] doing on immigration is not keeping people safe, he’s scaring people, including naturalized citizens, and creating chaos in our immigration system,” Ramos said. “El Salvador is the flash point. It underscores the lawlessness of this administration. It’s hard to say you’re a nation of laws when you are openly defying the Supreme Court and threatening U.S. citizens.”

Reichlin-Melnick said what Trump has managed to do is draw attention away from his clamping down of the border by leaning so aggressively into deportations to El Salvador. As a result, Americans see the controversy around El Salvador less as a border and immigration issue, and more as a matter of due process.

“People want immigration to be quote-unquote ‘handled’ but they want it to be done in a way that fits with their idea of the American justice system,” he said. “There is very strong support for giving people their fair day in court on immigration, so people understand that Trump’s idea that we can’t give them all court dates is ridiculous.” Trump recently protested against giving each deportee a hearing: “Such a thing is not possible to do.”

Rick Swartz, who founded the National Immigration Forum and worked on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (also known as the “Reagan amnesty”), predicted that Trump will face the consequences of his overreach.

“It’s good for the country that up to now mass deportation is failing,” Swartz told me. “It’s good for the country that their atrocious dehumanization has actually put a human face on immigration that the American public has come to see. Kilmar, who would have thought it? Understanding the cruelty of Trump’s intentions is beginning to break through, polls are beginning to reflect that.”

---

El Jefe Incompetente

YOU MAY BE ASKING, Adrian, what’s with the sudden crush of polling? Well, it’s often tied to major markers, like the conclusion of Trump’s first 100 days in office, which is coming next week. In fact, as I checked in with immigration advocacy and immigrants’ rights groups on polling and focus groups early in Trump’s term they told me to wait before drawing insights, because it will take time for voters to become aware of what’s going on, for Trump’s policies and actions to take effect and then for them to sink in and be reflected in the polls.

As Trump targeted university students because of their political opinions, canceled the legal status of refugees by executive fiat, and caught U.S. citizens—including Puerto Ricans and Trump voters—in his dragnet, his immigration numbers remained relatively strong. But that is no longer the case, as the new polling shows.

So let’s zoom in a bit.

I already mentioned the Reuters/Ipsos and Economist/YouGov polls with troubling news for Trump’s immigration agenda. Now, a new Pew poll found Trump’s net approval with Hispanics at a putrid -45. According to the 2024 exit polls, he ran just 5 points behind Kamala Harris with Latino voters in November.

I was curious about drilling down further in a border state like Arizona, where immigration is a perennially hot-button issue and where Trump won in November in part by peeling many male Latino voters away from Harris.

Video of a focus group of six Trump-backing, Spanish-speaking Latino men from Arizona, recorded by a Democratic research organization and provided exclusively to The Bulwark, revealed how each of them was critical of Trump’s policies and leadership. Three of them volunteered that they regret voting for Trump. His immigration policies played a major role in forming their opinions, as did the state of the economy and his tariff threats, which they felt all contributed to the general chaos.

Jesús, a Mexican-American construction worker from Chandler, Arizona said he voted for Trump because he thought he was going to make things better for him and his family, but instead he made things more “complicated.” He now often doesn’t know if there is going to be work available and “everything continues to be more expensive.”

But Jesús also feels misled on immigration.

“They’re not just deporting criminals, but also innocent people working here and paying taxes, but because they don’t have documents they’re deporting them,” he said.

Javier, a Panamanian from Phoenix who works in furniture delivery, also said he regrets his vote for Trump because he sees the Latino community living in fear of deportations.

“We all knew this was on Trump’s agenda but we thought it was going to be people committing crimes, who were going to deserve [deportation],” he said. “But nowadays it seems to be out of control, with news reports of many people paying the price of being deported unnecessarily.”

Javier also mentioned the case of Abrego Garcia as having an effect on him. Even though many of the men were critical of news organizations for perceived bias, they said they had all heard of the man wrongly shipped to El Salvador.

One of the men who said he regretted voting for Trump, Danny, a teacher in Phoenix, said the administration was “not being smart with how they’re deporting people.” In the case of Abrego Garcia, he said, “someone taken by mistake—it changes someone’s life forever.”

1. To put it another way: Feelings don’t care about your facts.