The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a whirlwind of activity, punctuated by action at the border, tariffs, turbulent markets, DOGE, multiple lawsuits, and constant headlines. This Washington Examiner series, “100-Day Report Card,” will look at six key issues and how they have come to define the early days of this administration. Part 2 is on immigration.
President Donald Trump took office in January and quickly moved on his campaign vow to seal off the southern border, but he faces an uphill battle carrying out the “largest-ever” deportation operation of illegal immigrants.
On Day One, the Trump administration began to wipe out policies of the Biden era that Republicans claimed triggered the most significant influx of immigrants at the border in national history.
Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said Trump has taken 175 major actions on immigration since Jan. 20 — six times more than in his first term and far beyond former President Joe Biden’s nearly 100 actions in the same time span.
“The pace and the intensity of immigration events have been far greater than most people would have expected,” said Meissner, senior fellow at the Washington office of the Migration Policy Institute, during a webinar with reporters Thursday. “The breadth and the sweep of what we are seeing are unmatched.”
Trump declared a national emergency at the border and surged federalized troops there, ended “catch and release,” ordered the continuation of border wall projects, designated cartels and foreign gangs as foreign terrorists, suspended refugee resettlement, ended birthright citizenship, and barred migrants from seeking asylum at the southern border — all of which occurred in his first few days in office.
The White House said the early results on the southern border are due to Trump’s immediate actions since his first day back in office.
“The American people delivered a resounding Election Day mandate to end the Biden administration’s border and illegal immigration nightmare,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in an email Friday. “The entire Trump administration has been aligned on a whole-of-government approach to deliver on this mandate, and the results have been historic: border encounters are at record lows and the most heinous killers, rapists, traffickers, and other criminal illegal aliens who terrorized American communities are being swiftly deported off of American soil.”
Although the number of immigrants arrested by Border Patrol while attempting to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico has dropped precipitously under Trump, the Trump administration has struggled to carry out its interior immigration operation.
Meanwhile, these past 100 days have not been without challenges for the Trump administration. The White House has faced several setbacks in the court of law and public opinion, especially in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran illegal immigrant living in Maryland, who the Trump administration admitted was mistakenly deported in March.
Although courts have ordered the U.S. to facilitate his return, Trump has not done so, and his officials have maintained that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang with a criminal record. Democrats have chosen to travel to El Salvador and advocate his return, albeit unsuccessfully.
Stopping illegal immigration at the border: A
Based on immigration analysts’ comments and a review of border statistics, the Washington Examiner gave Trump an “A” for following through on his promise to shut down illegal entries between the ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Border Patrol arrests of immigrants who illegally entered the country peaked at an all-time high of 250,000 in December 2023. In March, just 7,200 arrests were recorded by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The last time monthly figures averaged at less than last month was 55 years ago. The conservative-leaning Border Security Alliance championed Trump’s work on the border in such a short period.
“The drastic decrease in encounters since President Trump returned to the White House is a testament to what we already knew: the Border Can Be Secured,” BSA President Jobe Dickinson said in a statement. “These executive actions have significantly alleviated the workload of Border Patrol agents so they can focus on stopping the criminal cartel activity occurring along the southern border, including the smuggling of drugs, people, and counterfeit goods.”
The Washington Examiner has traveled to the border on dozens of occasions since 2018, but during its trip in February, its journalists did not witness a single immigrant attempting to cross the Rio Grande during a ride-along with Border Patrol.
Daniel Di Martino, a legal immigrant from Venezuela who analyzes immigration trends as a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank in New York, said Trump had “successfully secured” the southern border, but whether it stays quiet along the 2,000-mile boundary may be out of his control.
“What lies in the future is a little more uncertain interestingly due to tariffs: If the tariffs reduce U.S. economic activity as expected, that will reduce the incentive to come to America, but if they harm Mexico more, then maybe even more people will attempt to come,” Di Martino wrote in a message. “For now, I expect the U.S. economic slowdown to dominate, and so I believe border crossings will remain low this year.”
The only concern expressed came from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council in Washington, who pointed out that asylum-seekers were effectively unable to seek refuge at the border now, which meant there was no replacement pathway for people fleeing persecution to enter the U.S. Refusing to allow migrants to seek refuge could lead to a backlog of people seeking help in 2029, when Trump will leave office.
“We are three months into 48 months of his presidency, and the lesson of the last decade is that policies, dramatic short-term drops in migration, don’t necessarily work in the long term,” Reichlin-Melnick said during a phone call Friday.
Arresting and removing illegal immigrants: B-
In the U.S., Trump has waged the “largest-ever” deportation operation, set up a migrant camp at Guantanamo Bay, used military cargo planes to fly immigrants out of the country, and posted dozens of mug shots of illegal immigrants rounded up since Jan. 20.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance touted plans as candidates to start arresting and deporting the 500,000 to 1 million illegal immigrants with criminal records.
In addition to criminals, the Trump-Vance administration wants to remove the people who have already been ordered by a federal immigration judge to be deported.
At last count, roughly 1.4 million people have been ordered deported and are still in the U.S., White House border czar Tom Homan said during a press briefing Monday.
The operation started on Jan. 20, with arrests of illegal immigrants across the nation, and it has ramped up since then. It topped 2,300 arrests in the first week.
The operation’s success can be compared to previous administrations’ number of immigrants within the country arrested and the number who were removed.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests under Biden between fiscal 2021 and 2024 ranged from an average of 200 to 470 per day, depending on the year. A total of 500,000 arrests occurred in that period.
During Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021, daily arrests ranged from 280 to 440, for 548,000 arrests in four years.
But it was during the Obama administration that arrests were highest, according to the oldest available government data.
ICE arrested an average of 882 illegal immigrants per day in 2011, the highest of former President Barack Obama’s eight years in office.
In Obama’s first term, ICE arrested 1.22 million, compared to 641,000 in his second term.
ICE lacks the funding to house as many immigrants in detention as the White House would like to arrest, with fewer than 47,000 in custody at the moment.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin maintained that the Trump administration was “delivering beyond anyone’s expectations” regarding immigration enforcement and the border.
McLaughlin wrote in a statement that in under “100 days under President Trump, more than 150,000 illegal aliens were arrested.”
Public’s interest in immigration fades
Trump entered office and immediately got the U.S.-Mexico border under control while unleashing a nationwide deportation operation — moves that earned him a 49% approval rating on immigration among U.S. adults surveyed by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research between March 20 and 24.
A weekly tracker operated by YouGov shows that public concern with immigration has dropped significantly in recent months. In the past month, concern with civil rights and liberties has risen as more immigration coverage in the news has focused on individual immigrants’ rights under the Trump administration.
Democrats have become particularly concerned about Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. He was removed after ICE arrested him in mid-March, at the time Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the government to remove anyone with a terrorism affiliation without first sending him or her before an immigration judge. Abrego Garcia was wrongly removed to El Salvador despite his MS-13 gang affiliation, the Justice Department later admitted.
Trump paused implementing his ban on birthright citizenship after the issue went up to the Supreme Court for a final decision later this spring. The Supreme Court is also blocking the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan illegal immigrants. Most recently, the Supreme Court has stopped it from withholding federal funding from sanctuary cities.
The public’s interest may have shifted due to the sheer amount of news on immigration policy over the past 100 days. About 50 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration since January, just on immigration-related matters, including three that have already made it to the Supreme Court, according to MPI.
Trump scored higher in how he handled immigration in his first two months in office than any other issue, particularly trade and the economy, according to a national poll released 2 1/2 months into his term.
INTERNATIONAL TOURISM TO U.S. TAKES A HIT UNDER TRUMP
However, his approval has begun to shift against his favor.
Four national polls conducted in April show that most of the public is no longer behind Trump, particularly when the White House has tried to keep the Abrego Garcia storyline front and center in voters’ minds.