All modern presidents in the United States, both Republicans and Democrats, tried to reduce the population of millions of undocumented migrants. However, its various deportation strategies have not had significant results, with a population that is around 11 million between 2005 and 2022.
President Donald Trump seeks to change this situation.
With a hard rhetoric that sowed fear in migrant communities and policies that ignore their due process, Trump applied deportation tactics that drastically differ from those of any other modern president of the United States.
As an academic that examines the history of laws and the application of the migration law in the United States, I think it is not yet clear if Trump’s White House will significantly reduce the undocumented population. But even if administration’s efforts fail, fear and damage to the US migrant community will persist.
Presidents Bush and Obama
To increase deportations, in 2006, President George W. Bush began using raids in workplaces. Among these raids was the largest migration operation in the workplace in the history of the United States, carried out at a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008.
The United States Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) deployed 900 agents in Postville and arrested 398 employees, 98% of which were Latin. They were chained and processed in groups of 10 for serious crimes of aggravated identity, documentary fraud and use of stolen social security numbers. Some 300 were convicted, and 297 of them served prison before being deported.
In 2008, Bush also launched safe communities, a policy that sought to deport foreigners – both legal residents as undocumented migrants – arrested for crimes. About two million migrants were deported during Bush’s two mandates.
The Obama government limited safe communities to focus on the expulsion of foreigners convicted of serious crimes. He deported a record figure of 400,000 foreigners in the 2013 fiscal year, which led his detractors to refer to President Barack Obama as the “boss athlete.”
Obama also focused on newly arrived migrants and threats to national security, and promoted criminal proceedings for illegal re -entry to the United States. Almost all of these policies were based on Bush’s, although Obama practically abandoned the raids in workplaces.
Despite these control measures, Obama also implemented the deferred action for children in childhood (DACA) in 2012. This policy provided relief of deportation and authorized the work to more than 500,000 undocumented migrants who arrived in the United States being children.
Obama deported about 3 million foreigners, but the size of the undocumented population did not decrease dramatically.
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Deportations during Trump and Biden’s first government
Trump’s first government innovated in the application of the immigration law in several ways.
His presidency began by issuing what was called a “Muslim prohibition” to restrict entry to the United States from foreigners from predominantly Muslim countries.
At the beginning of Trump’s first government, federal agents expanded migratory operations to include raids in courts, which had previously been forbidden.
In 2017, Trump tried to rescind Daca, but the Supreme Court rejected its initiative in 2020.
In 2019, Trump implemented the policy of “staying in Mexico”, which for the first time forced foreigners who arrived at the US border in search of asylum to wait in Mexico while their requests were resolved. He also invoked title 42 in 2020 to close US borders during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump managed to reduce legal migration figures during his first term. However, there is no evidence that their migration control policies reduce the total size of the undocumented population.
President Joe Biden, on the other hand, tried to make more flexible, although not abandoning some migration control measures implemented by Trump during his first mandate.
His administration slowed the construction of the border wall, as well as stopped the raids in workplaces in 2021 and, in 2023, eliminated title 42.
In 2023, Biden tried to respond to the migratory increases in a member form, temporarily closing the entry ports and increasing arrests.
In his attempt to reinforce border security, his administration sometimes applied drastic measures. Biden continued with the deportations of criminal foreigners. Defending groups of immigrants criticized their administration when armed agents of the border on horseback were recorded by video chasing Haitian migrants on the border between the United States and Mexico.
In 2022, in the middle of the Biden mandate, it was estimated that 11 million undocumented migrants lived in the United States.
A second chance
Since his second investiture, Trump carried out a massive deportation campaign through executive orders of unprecedented scope.
In January 2025, he announced an extended and accelerated deportation process for any foreigner detained anywhere in the country, not only in the border region, as had been American practice since 1996.
In March, Trump issued a presidential proclamation to deport Venezuelan citizens members of the Trena de Aragua gang, designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. To do this, he invoked the law of foreign enemies of 1798, a law used three times in the history of the United States during declared wars, which empowers the presidents to expel foreigners from countries at war with the United States.
When declaring an “invasion” of migrants to the United States in June, Trump deployed the army to help in the application of immigration laws in Los Angeles.
Trump also tried to drastically reverse the right to citizenship by birth, the constitutional disposition that citizens guarantee any person born in the United States. In January, he issued an executive order that would prohibit citizens with people born in the United States of undocumented parents.
The Executive Order on Birth Law has been challenged in a federal court and it is very likely to reach the Supreme Court.
During the second Trump administration, immigration arrests have increased, but real deportation figures are fluctuating.
In June, the Customs Immigration and Control Service (ICE) arrested the largest number of people in a month in at least five years, approximately 30,000 immigrants. However, the deportations of foreigners (approximately 18,000) were lower than those of the 2013 Obama administration year, in which more than 400,000 foreigners were deported.
The gap between arrests and deportations shows the challenges faced by the Trump administration to meet its promising mass deportation campaign.
Undocumented migrants often come to the United States to work or seek refuge against natural disasters and mass violence.
These problems have not been seriously approached by any modern US president. Until it is, we can expect the undocumented population to remain millions.
*Kevin Johnson He is a professor of public interest and Chicanos studies at the University of California, Davis.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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