Trump Promised the Biggest Deportation Operation in History. It’s Not Happening.
But he is succeeding in one way.
Donald Trump may be a path-breaking politician in many respects, but there are still a handful of previous presidents that he looks to as role models.
He often promises to revive the trade agenda of William KcKinley, the 25th president, who he’s dubbed the “tariff king.” In both his terms, he’s hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, a reminder of the populist style the two share. And, during his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to follow the “Eisenhower model” of immigration policy.
Even Trump has acknowledged that last one is a bit surprising. “A very moderate man,” Trump said last weekend of Dwight Eisenhower, a centrist Republican whose foreign policy views could hardly be farther from his own. “But he was very strong on” immigration, Trump went on to add.
Trump is referring to a less-remembered legacy of the Eisenhower administration: the mass deportation program known as “Operation Wetback” (named for a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants). “He has the record” for deportations, Trump said of Eisenhower on the campaign trail. “But we’re going to, unfortunately, beat the record.”
There’s one inconvenient fact about “Operation Wetback” that Trump is overlooking, though: most historians agree that its impact was significantly overstated. While Eisenhower officials claimed that 1.2 million immigrants were deported as part of the operation, that figure includes people who were deported multiple times, some who were deported in previous years, and some who left the U.S. voluntarily. According to research by UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, the real number of deportations was likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 to 400,000.
The immigrants often faced brutal treatment as they were transported out of the U.S. — a congressional investigation compared conditions on a deportation ship to an “eighteenth century slave ship” — but, according to Hernández, Border Patrol agents didn’t actually do much differently day-to-day as they went about apprehending migrants. The operation was, in many ways, presented to the public as a much larger policy shift than it actually was. (Read our full article about Operation Wetback here.)
As Trump promises a new surge in mass deportations, history may be repeating itself.
One month into his second term, Trump is not yet on track to break any deportation records, whether Eisenhower’s or anyone else’s.
According to Department of Homeland Security data obtained by Reuters, the Trump administration deported 37,660 people in its first month. That’s fewer even than the monthly average of deportations in the last year of the Biden administration, which was 57,000.
The daily number of migrants Mexico is receiving from the U.S. appears to be down from Biden-era levels, while the number of deportation flights to Ecuador have remained about the same.
In a December interview, Trump said his goal over four years would be deporting all 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally, which would require upwards of 7,500 deportations a day. But, in the first two weeks of February, the Trump administration averaged fewer than 600 immigration arrests daily — and many arrests don’t even lead to deportations. (The administration’s internal goal for arrests is reportedly 1,200 to 1,400 per day.)
At Trump campaign events last year, attendees waved placards demanding “Mass Deportation Now” — while Trump promised to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history” on his first day back in office. Nothing of the sort seems to have materialized.
The administration’s failure to live up to its own expectations can be blamed on several factors.
For one thing, like many of his actions, some of Trump’s immigration orders have run into problems in the courts. In one high-profile case, a federal judge this week partially blocked the administration from enforcing a policy change that would have allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to make arrests at some houses of worship.
In other areas, the administration’s own moves could be undercutting its deportation goals: the firing of nearly two dozen immigration judges — the officials who must green light each deportation before ICE can carry them out — will hardly help anything go faster.
But, for the most part, the administration’s difficulty deporting more people than past presidents speaks to a larger truth about the immigration system: deportations — much less mass deportations — are logistically intensive. Migrants have to be located, then they have to be arrested, then they all have to be housed somewhere, then they have to be transported. Each of those steps requires significant money and manpower.
There is a reason, as immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has noted, that the number of deportations barely moved between the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations — even though they were three presidents with very different rhetoric on immigration. “Much of what happens at the border today boils down to resources, not policy,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote last year.
According to government data, 41,169 migrants were being housed in ICE detention in mid-February, almost exceeding the total capacity of ICE’s detention centers, which is 41,500. There are only so many more people the government will be able to detain and deport without more funding, something that will require congressional — not executive — action.
In the coming weeks, however, the Trump administration appears to be planning to step up its immigration enforcement.
A person familiar with the president’s thinking told NBC News that it’s driving Trump “nuts” that the deportation figures have been so low; the president recently removed the acting ICE director as a result.
Several dramatic steps appear to be in the works. According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is planning to “create a registry for immigrants in the U.S. illegally to submit their personal information.” Undocumented immigrants who fail to register could face fines or prison time, according to the plan.
Trump officials are also reportedly planning a nationwide operation to locate and potentially deport children who came into the U.S. without a parent, as well as the revival of Title 42, the public health rule that Trump used to quickly expel migrants during the Covid pandemic (and which Biden also used until it expired in 2023).
Going even further, according to Politico, a group of military contractors has pitched the White House on a plan to “carry out mass deportations through a network of ‘processing camps’ on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a ‘small army’ of private citizens empowered to make arrests.”
Trump is also finding ways to address the shortfall of resources, deputizing everyone from IRS agents to State Department officials as immigration agents to address the lack of personnel and planning to use military sites as detention centers to address the lack of housing capacity.
The administration is also considering tapping into Defense Department funds for immigration operations — although Trump could soon be receiving the funding boost he needs from Congress: Republican lawmakers voted Tuesday to advance a package that could deliver up to $190 billion in increased border security spending.
Meanwhile, as those proposals work their way through the executive and legislative branches, Trump’s immigration efforts have notched at least one meaningful success. While the president has made little headway in deporting the undocumented immigrants already here, his hawkish rhetoric appears to have succeeded in persuading fewer migrants to try to enter the U.S. illegally.
According to data obtained by Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered only about 15,700 migrants at the southern border during Trump’s first month in office — a very sharp drop from the 166,900 migrants encountered in an average month of the Biden administration.
Per Thiessen, a mere 200 migrants were encountered at the border on Saturday, the lowest one-day total in more than 15 years. White House border czar Tom Homan recently tweeted that only 229 migrants were encountered one day last week. “I started as a Border Patrol Agent in 1984 and I don’t remember the numbers ever being that low,” Homan said.
According to the New York Times, some migrant shelters near the border plan to close their doors “because of a lack of new arrivals.” Per the Associated Press, authorities are noticing a “reverse flow” from the border, as would-be migrants give up on their goal of claiming asylum in the U.S. and return in droves to their home countries.
In this respect, Trump’s immigration operation is again reminiscent of Eisenhower’s, which Hernández, the UCLA professor, has said was “more propaganda than it was a change in immigration law enforcement tactics or intensity.”
Like Trump, Eisenhower relied on theatrics — making big scenes of immigration arrests, even if he weren’t actually increasing them — in order to scare migrants into leaving on their own.
So far, Trump’s goal of accelerating deportations has mostly been a dud, but this Eisenhower-style strategy of using tough rhetoric to dissuade would-be migrants seems to be proceeding just as planned.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for this reporting, Gabe!
I think most of us agree recent crossing numbers were unsustainable - not because immigrants are dangerous (data shows the opposite), but because no system could adequately support such an influx. The real shame is our leaders' poverty of imagination. The choice they give seems binary: do nothing, or dehumanize migrants until America loses its identity as a beacon of hope.
If someone were crafting immigration policy with a real goal of fixing the problem, they'd focus on efficient asylum processing with expanded courts to resolve cases within weeks, not years - this would quickly identify legitimate asylum seekers while discouraging those using the system for economic migration.
They’d invest in smart border technology that targets trafficking while maintaining dignified legal crossing points.
They’d pursue meaningful partnerships with Mexico and Central American countries on economic development and anti-corruption initiatives that address the desperation driving migration in the first place.
For labor needs, they’d create streamlined seasonal work visas that respond to actual market demands without bureaucratic hurdles, which would redirect people from dangerous illegal crossings to orderly legal channels.
For those already integrated into our communities, they’d implement an earned legalization process with appropriate consequences that doesn't tear families apart and acknowledges the reality that mass deportation is neither practical nor consistent with our values as a nation that has historically benefited from immigration.
Now here is the big picture question: Why are our leaders so drawn to this false binary?
I believe it reflects a deeper dysfunction in our political system. Elections reward simplistic, emotionally charged solutions to complex problems - "build a wall" or "abolish ICE" make better campaign slogans than nuanced policy prescriptions. Our two-party system further entrenches this polarization, with each side retreating to their base rather than collaborating on workable solutions. Just as troublingly, the 24-hour news cycle and social media algorithms amplify the most extreme voices while moderate perspectives receive little attention.
Perhaps immigration, like healthcare, represents an issue where market-driven politics fails us. When human dignity and lives are at stake, should these decisions be subject to the same political calculations that govern tax policy or infrastructure spending? The commodification of human movement - treating migrants as either economic threats or exploitable labor - reveals the limits of applying purely economic frameworks to fundamentally human issues. Our election system simply isn't designed to handle problems requiring long-term, consistent policies that transcend administration changes.
One potential solution to remove immigration from the polarized political arena would be creating an independent, nonpartisan Immigration Commission modeled after the Federal Reserve. This commission would be staffed by experts in economics, humanitarian policy, border security, and international relations, serving staggered terms that cross administrations. They would set annual migration targets based on labor market needs, humanitarian concerns, and integration capacity—not electoral cycles. While Congress would establish broad parameters and oversight, the commission would have authority to adjust visa allocations, processing procedures, and enforcement priorities without requiring legislative approval for each decision.
For this to work, we would need a constitutional moment—a bipartisan agreement that immigration, like monetary policy, functions better with consistency and expert management than as a perpetual campaign issue. Paired with this would be local integration councils giving communities meaningful input into resettlement decisions, creating stakeholder buy-in.
Effective immigration policy requires both technical expertise and long-term planning that our current political system simply cannot provide when the issue remains a partisan football.
That being said, I think many politicians prefer the chaos of the status quo, because everything I just wrote doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
The military contractors’ pitch for a “small army of private citizens empowered to make arrests” is utterly unconscionable. I’ll pray that aspect never, ever comes to light.