President Donald Trump is escalating immigration enforcement as he attempts to deliver his promised “largest deportation program in American history.” Despite his efforts, however, he’s nowhere close.
That distinction belongs to an early 20th-century program that likely saw 2 million people deported. When looking at more recent times, it’s President Barack Obama — once dubbed by immigrant advocates “the deporter in chief” — who holds the 21st-century deportation record. His administration kicked out 438,421 people in 2013. No president since has come close to equaling that record, including Trump during his first term.
The political atmosphere that made the mass deportations of the 1900s possible is long gone. Similarly, Trump is likely to find it all but impossible to approach his goal of deporting “millions and millions” by borrowing from Obama’s playbook.
In fact, actions taken by Obama are part of why Trump’s ambitions have been stymied. If Trump truly wants to set a new record, he’ll need to more than double the current pace of deportations. And that will take a strategy that radically departs from those that have come before.
Obama’s immigration enforcement strategy was two-pronged: increasing penalties for unauthorized crossings at the southern border and deputizing local law enforcement to target immigrants with criminal records inside the US. The former increased the number of people who faced official removal proceedings and deterred repeat border crossers. And the latter allowed ICE to have its ear to the ground in cities throughout the country.
Before Obama, unauthorized border crossers were typically allowed to voluntarily return to Mexico, without undergoing an official process or being subjected to any penalties. That meant that many attempted to recross the border, knowing that they would not face repercussions for doing so.
The Obama administration started subjecting a greater proportion of them to formal deportation proceedings, utilizing an expanded federal immigration enforcement workforce that had grown from 12,700 in 2003 to 22,000 in 2008 with an influx of congressional funding.
That drove up the deportation numbers and also barred unauthorized crossers from reentering the US for another 10 years. If they tried to reenter anyway, they could be permanently barred. Many proved unwilling to take that risk, with the share of unauthorized crossers making multiple attempts to cross the border falling to 14 percent in fiscal year 2014.
Obama also utilized tools including agreements with local law enforcement agencies that allowed them to conduct immigration enforcement and a program known as “Secure Communities” to deport undocumented immigrants inside the US, prioritizing those with criminal records.
By the time Obama took office in 2009, about 70 of these 287(g) agreements had been signed. They allowed local law enforcement to receive training from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and issue immigration detainers, effectively deputizing them.
Through Secure Communities, local law enforcement shared fingerprints of people booked into local jails with federal immigration authorities, which would determine whether they were deportable. ICE could then ask local law enforcement to hold that person for up to 48 hours; agents would pick them up and transfer them to immigration detention.
Initially effective at increasing deportations, the Secure Communities program was short-lived. It faced blowback from primarily liberal jurisdictions, driving a revival of the movement to offer sanctuary to undocumented immigrants in the 2010s.
The concern among progressives was that it would reduce trust in law enforcement among immigrant communities and make everyone less safe because fewer people would report crimes. It also led to the deportation of people who had only committed minor offenses or had no criminal convictions.
In 2014, Obama rescinded the program in response. He replaced it with another program that focused only on deporting immigrants who had committed serious offenses. As a result, the number of deportations fell to about 414,000 that year and never resurged to their 2013 peak.
Trump might struggle to ramp up deportations along the border, as Obama did, simply because significantly fewer people are coming. In March, border apprehensions fell to 7,181, a 95 percent decrease from March 2024.
Trump would also likely face great opposition to a revived Secure Communities program.
The opposition in liberal enclaves — where many undocumented immigrants reside — to cooperating with federal immigration authorities has only hardened since the Obama era. In response, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has gone as far as threatening Democratic officials with arrest for shielding immigrants from deportation — prominent Democrats have been dismissive of this threat.
With these avenues cut off, Trump has launched workplace immigration raids across California, spurring mass protests in Los Angeles. He’s mobilized federal resources from the National Guard to the IRS to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants. He’s urged half a million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to self-deport.
None of that has been enough to match Obama’s pace of deportations so far, something that has reportedly frustrated Trump. However, deportations did increase to 17,200 in April, surpassing the number of deportations during the same period last year under the Biden administration.
It’s not clear whether Trump can maintain that momentum. For one, he suggested in a recent post on Truth Social that he’s now torn about deporting farmworkers and hotel workers after speaking with industry leaders who said that his policies were “taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” In the same post, he vowed that “changes are coming,” and followed that up with an announcement of new enforcement actions focused on cities.
At the same time, however, Trump is pushing for a spending bill now under consideration in the US Senate. It provides $155 billion in new immigration enforcement funding — more than five times the amount of current funding. While some Republicans say his request is too large, if the bill passes, Trump may soon have considerably greater resources to carry out his vision for mass deportations.
