Two years ago this month, more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were stopped by Customs and Border Protection officers along the southwest border of the United States, and almost all of them were quickly released into the country.
At the time, we were told by even supposedly conservative media outlets that there was nothing the Biden administration could do to stop the migrant flood and that only bipartisan legislation from Congress could solve the problem.
All of that turned out to be completely false. New legislation was not needed to secure the border, just a president with the political will to enforce existing laws and ignore the caterwauling from the nation’s liberal opinion pages.
Thanks to a secret agreement with Mexico, new illegal immigrant crossings were already falling by the time President Donald Trump took office in January of this year, but the Biden administration was still arresting about 100,000 migrants a month and releasing them into the United States. Once in office, Trump issued executive orders ending former President Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies, restarting the Remain in Mexico program, and expanding detention facilities in the U.S.
These took some time to work, but by May, for the first time ever, no migrants arrested on charges of illegally crossing the southern border were released into the U.S. The Trump administration has kept the number at zero every month since. By itself, this is a huge, historic accomplishment. But Trump has done much more.
In addition to stopping the flow of illegal immigrants, Trump has made significant strides in getting those here to leave and go home. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the illegal immigrant population grew from about 10 million when Biden took office to about 16 million when he left. Trump is reversing those numbers.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the administration has deported more than 605,000 illegal immigrants since Jan. 20, and another 1.9 million have voluntarily self-deported. This means that in just his first year in office, Trump has shrunk the illegal immigrant population by 2.5 million, undoing almost half of the damage Biden caused during his four-year term.
Of those deported by DHS, 70% either have “criminal convictions or pending criminal charges just in the U.S.,” according to reporting done by the Washington Examiner. That 70% does not include those wanted for violent crimes in their home country or other nations. The most common way criminal illegal immigrants are deported is after a traffic stop by local law enforcement, who alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials if an illegal immigrant with an arrest record has been detained. Unfortunately, many local jurisdictions controlled by Democrats refuse to hold criminal illegal immigrants until ICE can detain them. In Fairfax County, Virginia, one such illegal immigrant went on to kill an American citizen within 24 hours of being released.
Whether the Trump administration can keep up its deportation pace is an open question. When Trump took office, there were 1.4 million illegal immigrants who had already received final removal orders from a judge. DHS has tried to find many of them, but there are also more final orders for deportation being issued every day. Most illegal immigrants that Biden released into the country had flimsy asylum claims, and as their court dates materialize, they often fail to show up, allowing judges to issue deportation orders against them.
Trump also secured billions in funding to hire more ICE agents and build more detention facilities. These resources are still coming online and will add to the deportation totals.
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There is perhaps no issue that better illustrates the gulf between Washington elites and the public than immigration. For decades, voters were told illegal immigration wasn’t happening; that if it was happening, it was beneficial to the economy; and that even if it wasn’t, nothing could be done about it. That disconnect did more than any other issue to propel Trump first to the Republican nomination and then to the White House.
For all his other faults, Trump has delivered on his immigration promises. The border has been secured, something we were told could not be done, and for the first time in decades, the illegal immigrant population is shrinking. In a year of otherwise mixed results, Trump’s total control of the border stands as the defining domestic policy success story of 2025.