All trendy U.S. presidents, each Republican and Democratic, have tried to scale back the inhabitants of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. However their varied methods haven’t had vital outcomes, with the inhabitants hovering round 11 million from 2005 to 2022.
President Donald Trump seeks to alter that.
With harsh rhetoric that has sowed concern in immigrant communities, and insurance policies that ignore immigrants’ due course of rights, Trump has pursued deportation techniques that differ dramatically from these of another trendy U.S. president.
As a scholar who examines the historical past of U.S. immigration legislation and enforcement, I consider that it stays removed from clear whether or not the Trump White Home will considerably cut back the undocumented inhabitants. However even when the administration’s efforts fail, the concern and injury to the U.S. immigrant neighborhood will stay.
Presidents Bush and Obama
To extend deportations, in 2006 President George W. Bush started utilizing office raids. Amongst these sweeps was the then-largest immigration office operation in U.S. historical past at a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa in 2008.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployed 900 brokers in Postville and arrested 398 workers, 98% of whom have been Latino. They have been chained collectively and arraigned in teams of 10 for felony legal expenses of aggravated id theft, doc fraud and use of stolen Social Safety numbers. Some 300 have been convicted, and 297 of them served jail sentences earlier than being deported.
Males wait in a holding cell on June 21, 2006, in Nogales, Arizona.
Spencer Platt/Getty Photographs
In 2008, Bush additionally initiated Safe Communities, a coverage that sought to deport noncitizens – each lawful everlasting residents in addition to undocumented immigrants – who had been arrested for crimes. Some 2 million immigrants have been deported throughout Bush’s two phrases in workplace.
The Obama administration restricted Safe Communities to deal with the removing of noncitizens convicted of felonies. It deported a document 400,000 noncitizens in fiscal 12 months 2013, which led detractors to check with President Barack Obama because the “Deporter in Chief.”
Obama additionally focused current entrants and nationwide safety threats and pursued legal prosecutions for unlawful reentry to the U.S. Virtually all of those insurance policies constructed on Bush’s, though Obama nearly deserted office raids.
Regardless of these enforcement measures, Obama additionally initiated Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2012. The coverage offered reduction from deportation and gave work authorization to greater than 500,000 undocumented immigrants who got here to america as kids.
Obama deported about 3 million noncitizens, however the measurement of the undocumented inhabitants didn’t lower dramatically.
The primary Trump administration and Biden
Trump’s first administration broke new immigration enforcement floor in a number of methods.
He started his presidency by issuing what was referred to as a “Muslim ban” to limit the entry into the U.S. of noncitizens from predominantly Muslim nations.
Early in Trump’s first administration, federal brokers expanded immigration operations to incorporate raids at courthouses, which beforehand had been off-limits.
In 2017, Trump tried to rescind DACA, however the Supreme Courtroom rejected Trump’s effort in 2020.
In 2019, Trump carried out the Stay in Mexico coverage that for the primary time pressured noncitizens who got here to the U.S. border searching for asylum to attend in Mexico whereas their claims have been being determined. He additionally invoked Title 42 in 2020 to shut U.S. borders through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump succeeded in decreasing authorized immigration numbers throughout his first time period. Nonetheless, there isn’t any proof that his enforcement insurance policies diminished the scale of the general undocumented inhabitants.
President Joe Biden sought to chill out – though not abandon – some immigration enforcement measures carried out throughout Trump’s first time period.
His administration slowed building of the border wall championed by Trump. Biden additionally stopped office raids in 2021, and in 2023, he ended Title 42.
In 2023, Biden sought to answer migration surges in a measured trend, by briefly closing ports of entry and growing arrests.
In trying to implement the borders, his administration at instances pursued powerful measures. Biden continued deportation efforts directed at legal noncitizens. Immigrant rights teams criticized his administration when armed Border Patrol officers on horseback have been videotaped chasing Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.
As of 2022, the center of the Biden’s time period, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants lived within the U.S.
Immigration-rights activists stage a rally outdoors President Barack Obama’s Democratic Congressional Marketing campaign Committee fundraiser in Los Angeles, after the president signed a invoice that tightened safety on the Mexico border in August 2010.
Mark Ralston/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
A second probability
Since his second inauguration, Trump has pursued a mass deportation marketing campaign by government orders which are unprecedented of their scope.
In January 2025, he introduced an expanded, expedited removing course of for any noncitizen apprehended anyplace within the nation – not simply the border area, as had been U.S. follow since 1996.
In March, Trump issued a presidential proclamation to deport Venezuelan nationals who have been members of the Tren de Aragua gang, designated a international terrorist group by the State Division. In doing so, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – an act used thrice in U.S. historical past throughout declared wars that empowers presidents to take away international nationals from nations at struggle with the U.S.
Declaring an “invasion” of migrants into the U.S. in June, Trump deployed the navy to help in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
Trump additionally sought to dramatically upend birthright citizenship, the Constitutional provision that ensures citizenship to any individual born within the U.S. He issued an government order in January that will bar citizenship to individuals born within the U.S. to undocumented mother and father.
California Nationwide Guard members stand in formation throughout a protest in Los Angeles on June 14, 2025.
David Pashaee/Center East Photographs/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
The birthright government order has been challenged in federal court docket and is generally possible working its manner as much as the Supreme Courtroom.
Underneath the second Trump administration, immigration arrests are up, however precise deportation numbers are in flux.
ICE in June arrested the most individuals in a month in not less than 5 years, roughly 30,000 immigrants. However deportations of noncitizens – roughly 18,000 – lagged behind these through the Obama administration’s record-setting 12 months of 2013 by which greater than 400,000 noncitizens have been deported.
The hole between arrests and deportations reveals the challenges the Trump administration faces in making good on his promised mass deportation marketing campaign.
Undocumented immigrants usually come to the U.S. to work or search security from pure disasters and mass violence.
These points haven’t been significantly addressed by any trendy U.S. president. Till it’s, we will count on the undocumented inhabitants to stay within the hundreds of thousands.
