
100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a Failure
Deportation statistics and poll numbers both say so.

DURING THE 2024 CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump promised to ālaunch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of Americaā on his first day in office, telling Time ā15 million and maybe as many as 20 million peopleā could be rounded up and shipped off.
And when he returned to power, Trumpās 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.
āThat 100,000 number at the end of March can not be correct,ā 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 sixāto more than 3,800 arrests every dayāfor 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 wouldnāt reach a number of arrests that makes the statistic of 100,000 deportations plausible.
Of course, in politicsāespecially Trumpās kind of politicsāfacts donāt matter as much as peopleās perceptions.1 Trumpās immigration policies will succeed or fail depending on whether Americans view them as improving their lives. And thereās 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 ātoo harsh.ā (Sam Stein and Andrew Egger broke down these polls in detailācheck 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 shouldnāt 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.
āWhat is remarkable about Trumpās first 100 days is that he took the two issues he was strongest onāthe economy and immigrationāand completely destroyed his credibility on both,ā 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.
āWhat [Trump is] doing on immigration is not keeping people safe, heās scaring people, including naturalized citizens, and creating chaos in our immigration system,ā Ramos said. āEl Salvador is the flash point. It underscores the lawlessness of this administration. Itās hard to say youāre a nation of laws when you are openly defying the Supreme Court and threatening U.S. citizens.ā
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.
āPeople want immigration to be quote-unquote āhandledā but they want it to be done in a way that fits with their idea of the American justice system,ā he said. āThere is very strong support for giving people their fair day in court on immigration, so people understand that Trumpās idea that we canāt give them all court dates is ridiculous.ā Trump recently protested against giving each deportee a hearing: āSuch a thing is not possible to do.ā
Rick Swartz, who founded the National Immigration Forum and worked on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (also known as the āReagan amnestyā), predicted that Trump will face the consequences of his overreach.
āItās good for the country that up to now mass deportation is failing,ā Swartz told me. āItās 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 Trumpās intentions is beginning to break through, polls are beginning to reflect that.ā
El Jefe Incompetente
YOU MAY BE ASKING, Adrian, whatās with the sudden crush of polling? Well, itās often tied to major markers, like the conclusion of Trumpās first 100 days in office, which is coming next week. In fact, as I checked in with immigration advocacy and immigrantsā rights groups on polling and focus groups early in Trumpās term they told me to wait before drawing insights, because it will take time for voters to become aware of whatās going on, for Trumpās 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. citizensāincluding Puerto Ricans and Trump votersāin his dragnet, his immigration numbers remained relatively strong. But that is no longer the case, as the new polling shows.
So letās zoom in a bit.
I already mentioned the Reuters/Ipsos and Economist/YouGov polls with troubling news for Trumpās immigration agenda. Now, a new Pew poll found Trumpās 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 Trumpās 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.
JesĆŗs, 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 ācomplicated.ā He now often doesnāt know if there is going to be work available and āeverything continues to be more expensive.ā
But JesĆŗs also feels misled on immigration.
āTheyāre not just deporting criminals, but also innocent people working here and paying taxes, but because they donāt have documents theyāre deporting them,ā 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.
āWe all knew this was on Trumpās agenda but we thought it was going to be people committing crimes, who were going to deserve [deportation],ā he said. āBut nowadays it seems to be out of control, with news reports of many people paying the price of being deported unnecessarily.ā
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 ānot being smart with how theyāre deporting people.ā In the case of Abrego Garcia, he said, āsomeone taken by mistakeāit changes someoneās life forever.ā
To put it another way: Feelings donāt care about your facts.
Four prominent facts need repetition.
Fact one: the U.S. is a nation of immigrants, eighty million from one hundred or more nations, who have broadened and enriched the most remarkable and diverse culture in the world.
Fact two: thirty years of Congressional neglect to administer and legislate immigration sensibly has produced the growing immigration chaos we have experienced.
Fact three: the current 'administration' is firing judges in the grossly overworked administration of immigrant processing, thus being able to 'prove' that the system does not work. Clever, eh?
Fact four: considering world and US demographics, the US needs immigrants to undertake the work of the nation's principal activities.
Rinse and repeat.
See, if these assholes were smart they'd say that the arrest/deportation numbers are low because border crossings have plummeted since Trump took office (which is true, and the Darian Gap being a ghost town is evidence of this), but instead they went with numbers inflation instead which leaves them vulnerable to scrutiny.