No BS.
The truth about Donald Trump’s performance on immigration in his first year is that it falls somewhere between the despairing narrative of blackpillers and the MAGA cheerleaders.
- Border crossings have collapsed. There has been a 92% to 95% reduction in illegal immigration from its peak in the Biden years. Trump was able to swiftly bring the border under control mainly because he was able to implement policies which were litigated in his first term.
- The flood of illegal aliens at the border has dwindled to a trickle. As a result, there are fewer illegal aliens to deport at the border like under Obama and Biden. In spite of this, 270,000 of Trump’s deportations in 2025 – the majority of deportations – were returns at the border.
- In 2025, only 230,000 illegal aliens were arrested and deported from the interior, which is roughly equivalent to one month of illegal immigration under Joe Biden.
- Only 540,000 illegal aliens in total were deported in 2025
In other words, it has proven to be far easier for Biden to let illegal aliens flood into the country than it has been for Trump to deport them. Deporting a mere 230,000 illegals in these theatrical raids in Los Angeles and Minneapolis has already burned up most public support for mass deportations.
“Over the past year, President Trump’s administration has deported about 230,000 people who were arrested inside the country and another 270,000 at the border, a New York Times analysis of federal data shows.
The number of deportations from interior arrests since Mr. Trump took office is already higher than the total during the entire four years of the Biden administration. It offers the clearest measure of the impact of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and expansive efforts to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of people. …”
Is that a blackpill?
Here a few points to consider:
- The Big Beautiful Bill was only passed in June. The Trump administration is hiring thousands of ICE agents. They have billions of dollars to spend on cranking up deportations. It was realistically always going to take time to hire the personnel to increase ICE capacity. While the Trump administration fell far short of “mass deportations” in 2025, the number of deportations will likely go up.
- The Supreme Court is going to rule on birthright citizenship and other Trump policies which have been challenged in court and have hit speed bumps in the district courts. Litigation over the border wall and Remain in Mexico in Trump’s first term went on for years.
- Legal immigration is being cut in various ways like creative uses of fees and by creating new bureaucratic hurdles.
- It is a gross exaggeration to say that there is “no difference” between Trump’s immigration policies and Joe Biden’s immigration policy. Trump has been a relative improvement.
The bottom line here is that three more years of only 230,000 deportations from the interior is a failure even if it is a relatively better performance than Bush, Obama and Biden. We are still sinking when a Democratic president can usher in millions of people across the border and a Republican president can only deport about a million from inside the country over four years in response.
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