After major enforcement operations, the Trump administration
recalibrates its immigration crackdown
[May 02, 2026]
By REBECCA SANTANA
WASHINGTON (AP) — When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was
questioned by senators during his confirmation hearing about his vision
for implementing President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, he
said his goal was to keep his department off the front pages of the
news.
To some degree, he has. Gone are the social media video clips of
now-retired Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino clashing with
protesters. Mullin's predecessor, Kristi Noem, made her first trip as
secretary to New York City to make arrests with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. In contrast, Mullin went to North Carolina to review
hurricane recovery efforts.
The Republican administration appears to be recalibrating its approach
to a centerpiece policy that helped bring Trump back to the White House,
moving in many ways away from aggressive, public-facing tactics toward a
quieter approach to enforcement. Despite that shift, the administration
insists it is not backing down from its lofty deportation goals.
“Clearly they’ve stepped back from the, for want of a better word, the
Bovinoist tactics of before," said Mark Krikorian, the president of the
Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for immigration
restrictions. "But it’s not clear this means they’re actually stepping
back from immigration.”
The Trump administration launched a series of immigration enforcement
operations last year in mostly Democratic-led cities, which drove up
arrests in large-scale sweeps. The crackdown sparked clashes between
protesters and enforcement officers and led to the shooting deaths in
Minneapolis of two U.S. citizens.
Since then, the president’s hard-line anti-immigration agenda has lost
popularity with voters and there have been no new high-profile
city-based operations launched, raising questions about the
administration's strategy.
“We’re still enforcing immigration laws. We’re still deporting illegals
that shouldn’t be here. We’re still going after the worst of the worst —
but we’re doing it in a more quiet way,” Mullin said in an interview
April 16 with CNBC.
Immigration arrests have dropped, but deportation goals remain
ICE arrests have fallen in recent months, and the number of people in
immigration detention has dropped from a high of roughly 72,000 in
January to 58,000 this week, according to data obtained by The
Associated Press.
But in a sign of its continued determination, ICE in budget documents
says it plans to remove 1 million people this fiscal year and the next
compared with roughly 442,000 people last year. The agency also has
plenty of money to carry out its mission, with Congress granting the
Department of Homeland Security more than $170 billion for Trump's
immigration agenda last year.
The administration aims to have enough space to detain roughly 100,000
people this fiscal year, which would more than double the average daily
number held in ICE detention last year. The administration has already
expanded its detention capacity with the purchase of 11 warehouses
across the country.
“They are working on really building a juggernaut of a system,” said
Doris Meissner, who headed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, a predecessor to ICE, during President Bill Clinton's
Democratic administration and is now a senior fellow at the Migration
Policy Institute.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said there had been no change
to Trump's strategy.
"President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of
illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” Jackson
said.
ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Stripping away legal protections to ramp up deportations
Advocates for immigrants are bracing for the Trump administration to
turn its attention more intently to stripping away protections for
migrants with temporary legal status to remain in the U.S. while their
cases are being adjudicated.
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Federal officers stand guard after detaining people outside of
Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Jan. 13, 2026, in
Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray, File)
In one example of this, the number of green cards approved by U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped by half over the course
of a year under the Trump administration, according to an analysis
by the Cato Institute, which supports immigration into the U.S.
Humanitarian visas for refugees or people who qualified for asylum
saw the biggest declines.
USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the drop was due to increased
vetting of applicants by the administration.
The Trump administration has also pushed to strip Temporary
Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of people, with a key
case weighing whether it's overstepped its power to do so being
heard at the Supreme Court this week.
Advocates see it as a way to send a chilling message to immigrant
communities and make more people vulnerable to deportation. It also
enables the department to operate without the public spectacle of
workplace raids or home arrests.
ICE has also focused over the past year on creating agreements with
jurisdictions around the country that allow local and state law
enforcement to carry out an expanding array of immigration
enforcement tasks, ranging from checking the immigration status of
people in their jails to incorporating immigration checks during
routine traffic stops.
These agreements, known as 287g, have grown from 135 in 20 states
before Trump took office to more than 1,400 in 41 states and
territories now.
Some states, most noticeably Florida and Texas, have mandated
various forms of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE.
Meissner, from MPI, said Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, is likely
to prioritize further discussions about how cities and states can
cooperate with ICE.
“At the end of the day, some of this may very well succeed in
increasing the numbers,” Meissner said.
Calls to enforce work restrictions
Conservatives who want more deportations say the only way to truly
crack down on illegal immigration is to make it so difficult for the
migrants to work that they’ll leave on their own.
The Trump administration has already taken steps to make life harder
for people in the country illegally including limiting who can live
in public housing by immigration status, sharing Medicaid
information with ICE and requiring people in the country illegally
to register with the federal government.
Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Social
Security Administration could send out letters alerting employers
when an employee's name doesn't match their Social Security number.
Authorities could repeatedly and consistently carry out audits of
I-9 forms, which companies are supposed to fill out and submit to
the federal government showing that new hires are legally able to
work. And they could require banks to collect citizenship
information on customers.
Whatever the strategy going forward, the administration is facing
heavy pressure not to back away from its goals.
“The numbers are too low," said Mike Howell, part of the Mass
Deportation Coalition, which launched a playbook for how the
administration can actually get to a million deportations a year by
using tactics such as worksite enforcement.
“The deportation numbers are just too low," Howell said, "and they
need to be much higher, and they can be much higher.”
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