By Ira Mehlman
FAIR
The dramatic decline in people entering the United States illegally since President Trump took office has grabbed the headlines, and deservedly so. In February, the first full month of the new administration, nationwide encounters of illegal aliens entering the country numbered just 28,654, compared to 256,071 in February 2024. Along the Southwest border, just 8,347 encounters between ports of entry were reported by Border Patrol, the lowest number recorded since the agency began reporting monthly totals in 2000. And, unlike under the Biden administration, nearly all of those encountered last month were either detained or removed, instead of being released into the country.
Record low encounters was not the only positive news in February. With still two days left in the month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested more than 20,000 illegal aliens in February, compared with “just 33,000 at large arrests under Biden for ALL of last year.” If that pace is maintained over the course of the year, it would represent a 627 percent increase over the arrests carried out during President Biden’s final year in office.
ICE arrests are the first step in removing aliens who are living in the country illegally. But even at the current stepped-up pace, it would only put a small dent in the total illegal alien population estimated by FAIR to be 18.6 million. Even removing the 7 million illegal aliens who are currently on ICE’s non-detained docket or who have been issued final orders of removal would still leave more than 10 million people living in the U.S. illegally.
Significantly reducing the illegal alien population over the four years Mr. Trump is in office will require more than just executive action. To reach that goal, Congress will need to appropriate additional funds for increased ICE manpower and detention space to hold illegal aliens until they can be removed from the country. It will also require greater cooperation on the part of state and local law enforcement and more disincentives for illegal aliens to remain in the country.
ICE has already maxed out all available bedspace with 47,600 aliens in detention. As FAIR learned during a visit to an ICE detention center in San Diego earlier this month, the average stay at the Otay Mesa facility is 76 days, meaning that it takes eleven weeks to free up an occupied bed to make room for a new detainee. ICE is currently seeking to expand its capacity by utilizing available Defense Department, U.S. Marshals Service and Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities and contracting with private prison companies. Another 30,000 detention beds were to be made available at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, although the Trump administration recently returned all of the migrants held there to facilities in the United States.
Other force multipliers for immigration enforcement include expansion of the 287(g) program, which trains state and local law enforcement officers to identify illegal aliens and share that information with federal officials. When local law enforcement transfers custody of deportable aliens to federal officials at the jail or courthouse, it ensures that the transfers will be safe and that ICE does not have to go out looking for them. Just since the start of the Trump administration, 226 new 287(g) agreements have been signed with law enforcement departments around the country.
In addition to taking more illegal aliens into custody, the administration is implementing policies designed to convince illegal aliens to leave on their own. Last month (citing FAIR’s report about the cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers), President Trump signed an executive order directing all federal “departments and agencies to identify all federally funded programs currently providing financial benefits to illegal aliens and take corrective action.” That order was followed up last week by the Department of Health and Human Services with a letter demanding that state and local governments “cease taxpayer subsidies to illegal aliens in contravention of law.”
The Trump administration is not only encouraging illegal aliens to depart voluntarily through increased enforcement and elimination of benefits, it has also begun assisting illegal aliens to leave the country. The CBP One phone app, which had been used by the Biden administration to allow inadmissible aliens to schedule appointments to cross the border at legal ports of entry, has been repurposed to provide illegal aliens a means to inform the government of their intention to depart. Illegal aliens who self-deport “may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future,” Secretary Noem advises. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return,” she cautions.
These efforts will need to be sustained and codified into law if we are to achieve the long-term goal of shrinking the size of the illegal alien population. The initial results of border enforcement and ending illegal parole programs mean that very few new illegal aliens are entering the country. Continued vigorous interior enforcement, combined with the systematic elimination of rewards for violating our immigration laws, represent the next phase of the effort to reverse the harmful effects of decades of mass illegal immigration.
