During Donald Trump's second term as president of the United States, his administration has pursued a deportation policy generally described as "hardline", "maximalist", and as a "mass deportation" campaign, involving the detention, confinement, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their family members. The Trump administration has claimed that around 140,000 people had been deported as of April 2025, though some estimates put the number at roughly half that. On August 28, 2025, CNN reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone had deported nearly 200,000 people in seven months since Trump returned to office. By January 2026, the number of people which ICE alone deported rose to roughly 540,000, which is down from the number of people deported under Joe Biden in 2023 and 2024.

The use of deportation flights by the U.S. has created pushback from some foreign governments, particularly that of Colombia. The total population of illegal immigrants in the United States was estimated at 11 million in 2022, with the top three states of California, Texas, and Florida constituting over half of the total population.

The administration has used the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport immigrants with limited or no due process, and to be imprisoned in El Salvador, which was halted by federal judges and the Supreme Court. Several US citizens have been detained and deported. Administration practices have faced legal issues and controversy with lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.

At the time of the January 2025 start to Trump's second presidential term, a majority of Americans supported deporting all illegal immigrants present in the United States. As early as April 2025, multiple polls found that the majority of Americans thought that the deportations went "too far". In early 2026, national protests against deportation escalated after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both American citizens, by immigration agents. In July 2026, multiple vigils and protests broke out after an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, followed several days later by an ICE agent fatally shooting Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

Background

In January 2025, under the Biden administration, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol conducted "Operation Return to Sender" in Kern County. Under the command of senior official Gregory Bovino, the operation has been described "as a blueprint for the broader immigration crackdown that was to come". According to the case, United Farm Workers v. Noem filed by the ACLU, Border Patrol agents were alleged to have gone "on a fishing expedition, dispensing with reasonable suspicion and stopping people based on assumptions about their race or occupation instead", "made warrantless arrests", people arrested "were expelled to Mexico after being coerced to accept voluntary departure", "agents did not identify themselves", and "agents denied (...) repeated requests to call a lawyer". In April 2025, Judge Jennifer L. Thurston granted a preliminary injunction forbidding Border Patrol from conducting warrantless stops and acting without reasonable suspicion in the Eastern District of California.

2024 campaign

Trump's campaign heavily relied on fearmongering against immigrants. He repeatedly used racial stereotypes and dehumanizing rhetoric to paint the influx of illegal immigrants as an assault—an "invasion"—on the American public, citing baseless accounts of their proclivity for crime. On the campaign trail in December 2023, Trump said immigrants coming to the U.S. are "poisoning the blood of our country", a remark that quickly drew a rebuke from scholars, historians, and his political opponents likening the phrase to racial hygiene rhetoric and language used by Adolf Hitler.

The New York Times reported that Trump planned "an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration", including "preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled", and that it "amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history". The New York Times also reported that Trump's advisors were preparing a 'blitz' strategy designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers, and that his plans would rely on existing statutes without the need for new legislation, although such legislation would also likely be attempted. At the time, economic reports from the Brookings Institution and Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Trump's plans would result in a decrease in employment for American-born workers and result in "no economic growth over the second Trump administration from this policy alone" while other estimates had it shrinking the American gross domestic product by about 4-7%.

Policy intentions and proposals During his rallies, Trump said he would revoke the temporary protected status of Haitian migrants living legally in the US and deport them back to Haiti. Trump did not rule out separating families with mixed citizenship status.

The American Immigration Council said that a "highly conservative" estimate of Trump's plan would come in at least $315 billion, or $967.9 billion over a decade, and be unworkable without massive outdoor detention camps.

Trump stated that his plan would follow the 'Eisenhower model,' a reference to the 1954 campaign Operation Wetback. To achieve the goal of deporting millions per year, Trump stated his intent to expand expedited removal pursuant to section 235 of the Immigration and Nationality Act; invoke the Alien Enemies Act within the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; and invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow the military to apprehend immigrants and bypass the Posse Comitatus Act.

Trump told a rally audience in September 2024 that the deportation effort "will be a bloody story". He also spoke of rounding up homeless people in Democratic-leaning cities and detaining them in camps. The Trump team said they would also attempt to overturn the Flores settlement that prevents the indefinite holding of children.

Trump promised to reinstate his ban on entry to individuals from certain Muslim-majority nations, and have the Centers for Disease Control reimpose COVID-era restrictions on asylum claims by asserting immigrants carry infectious diseases such as the flu, tuberculosis, and scabies. Trump said he would build more of the border wall, and move thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to the southern border.

Other proposals included revoking temporary protected status for individuals living in the United States, ending birthright citizenship for persons born in the United States to foreign parents, using coercive diplomacy by making immigration cooperation a condition for bilateral engagement, reinstating 'Remain in Mexico' and reviving 'safe third country' status with several nations in Central America, as well as expanding it to Africa, Asia, and South America.

Trump's campaign stated his intention to expel Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients after his previous attempt failed in 2020 by a 5–4 vote in the Supreme Court in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California.

Implementation actions

Policy changes On January 22, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the administration was rolling back an Obama-era directive that had protected undocumented immigrants in sensitive areas such as hospitals, places of worship, courtrooms, funerals, weddings and schools. A spokesperson stated that the Trump administration was not looking to tie the hands of law enforcement.

On January 23, Acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman sent out a memo stating that immigrants admitted temporarily by the Biden administration could be removed.

On February 19, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order to prevent the Office of Refugee Resettlement from funding organizations providing legal services to unaccompanied minors entering the United States; Mother Jones said the order stopped legal representation for 25,000 minors and education programs on rights for 100,000 others.

On March 14, United States Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive allowing law enforcement officials to enter the homes of migrants without warrants.

As deportation flights have increased, airlines have increasingly sought to hide details about their planes from flight trackers.

On July 4, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill, which included $170 billion in spending for border security, the biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in US history. The bill, which stated a goal of deporting one million immigrants yearly, also made ICE "the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government."

In November, federal officials announced plans to hire thousands of "skip tracers" to conduct online and in-person verification of the home and work addresses of up to 1.5 million people living in the US.

On January 7, 2026, the same day that an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good in Minnesota, Vice President JD Vance promised an escalation in immigration enforcement actions and policies. He said that over 10,000 additional ICE agents would be deployed in the United States, using personal data harvested by private contractors to identify targets for arrest. He said that agents would go "door to door" in the coming months to carry out Trump's mass deportation agenda.

Diversion and support from other government agencies On January 23, 2025, the DHS authorized federal law enforcement to assist in carrying out Trump immigration policies. A memo from DHS official Benjamine Huffman granted "the functions of an immigration officer" to several agencies within the U.S. Department of Justice including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service. In April 2025, the Postal Inspection Service began cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts.

In July, the U.S. Department of Defense increased the number of authorized military personnel designated to support ICE from 1,200 to 1,700 and rotated in National Guard personnel while sending Marines and Naval Reserve personnel to their home stations.

In August, Trump froze training for non-ICE federal agencies through the end of the year to accommodate immigration enforcement hires.

In September 2025, the Cato Institute found that ICE had diverted over 25,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers from their jobs. Of those 25,000, 14,498 were from federal agencies and 8,501 were state and local police. FBI data from October 2025 found that nearly 1/4 of FBI agents, including nearly half in major offices, had been reassigned to support immigration enforcement.

By November 2025, immigration cases had overtaken drug and fraud cases in US courts. The number of immigration cases tripled on an annual basis while new fraud and drug cases fell by 17% and 27% respectively.

Revocation of legal status In May 2025, the Supreme Court permitted the Trump administration to revoke the protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants. This action was described as "the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history".

Raids and detention

Deportation