Few presidents have so thoroughly delivered on a campaign promise as President Donald Trump has succeeded in securing the southern border. In December 2023, under the Biden administration, a record high of 301,981 illegal immigrants were arrested at the border. Just one month after Trump took office, that number had fallen to 11,000. 

Under former President Joe Biden, our southern border was a lawless free-for-all where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were being caught and released into the United States every month. Biden was even helping thousands of them fly into the country.

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Trump put an end to all of that. Our border is more secure now than at any other time in our nation’s recorded history. And it is all thanks to Trump’s commitment to enforce our nation’s immigration laws as written.

There are some in the media, however, who don’t believe Trump is doing enough to deport those illegal immigrants already in the U.S. CBS News, for example, reported in December 2024 that the Biden administration had deported 271,484 illegal immigrants that year, which was higher than any number posted by the first Trump administration.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat picked up on this claim in his recent interview with Vice President JD Vance, noting that, “On deportations, it seems like the actual process is not moving that quickly,” and that “at the current pace of deportations, you would be deporting numbers commensurate with prior presidents.”

That is actually untrue if early reports of Trump’s second-term deportations are to be believed, but as Vance tried to tell Douthat, even those surface numbers are highly misleading. Here is how Vance described it:

“Sometimes you will hear people say that deportations in the Trump administration are down relative to the Biden administration. That is in fact an artifact of the fact that the Biden border was effectively wide open. In other words, if somebody comes across the border illegally and you immediately turn them around, or you schedule a deportation hearing and say, come back for your hearing, a lot of both of those would get counted as deportation. So you can have a lot of deportations when you have quite literally millions of people per year walking across the border.”

This is all very true, but I think attaching some actual numbers to Vance’s description would be helpful.

In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security deported 271,484 illegal immigrants. That would appear to be more than the 267,258 that Trump deported in 2019. But when you dig into the numbers and look at the arresting agency, it becomes clear that Biden made far less of an effort to deport illegal immigrants already in the U.S. than Trump did.

Of those 271,484 illegal immigrants deported by DHS in 2024, just 47,732 of them were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers inside the U.S. The remaining 223,752 were arrested by Customs and Border Protection officers at the border and immediately turned back.

Contrast that with Trump’s 2017 numbers, where ICE officials arrested and deported 85,958 illegal immigrants, while CBP officers arrested and deported just 181,300. That smaller number isn’t the fault of the CBP officers. They can arrest and deport only as many illegal immigrants as show up at the border. If fewer illegal immigrants try to cross the border, then there are fewer illegal immigrants they can deport.

The story is very different for ICE officials arresting illegal immigrants inside the U.S., which is what most people think of when they hear the word deportation: Immigrants already in the U.S. being arrested and then sent home.

And by that metric, Trump deported almost double what Biden did in his best year.

Now, thanks to COVID-19, the drop-off between Biden and Trump when it comes to interior deportations is a little messy, but here are the data. In 2018, Trump deported 95,360 illegal immigrants from the interior of the country. That number declined a little in 2019 to the aforementioned 85,958 but then slipped further, due to COVID-19, in 2020 to 62,739.

But then, once Biden took over, that interior enforcement number cratered to just 31,557 deportations in 2021, and then it fell even further to just 28,204 in 2022. And while Biden was busy not deporting anyone from inside the U.S., illegal border crossings surged from just 36,000 the month Biden took office to 241,000 in May 2022.

As damning as these interior deportation numbers are for Biden, the numbers for former President Barack Obama, the supposed “deporter in chief,” are far worse.

As late as 2014, Obama’s DHS was deporting more than 100,000 illegal immigrants a year from the interior of the country. But then, in November 2014, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson released a memo setting new enforcement priorities for ICE. ICE was now to focus its deportation efforts only on national security threats, those with multiple misdemeanors, and those with recent removal orders. All other illegal immigrants were to be ignored. Arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants promptly fell off a cliff.

In 2013, 133,551 illegal immigrants were deported from the interior of the country, but by 2014, when the Johnson memo was issued, that fell to 102,224. After a full year of the Johnson memo, the number fell further to 69,478 in 2015 and then fell again in 2016 to 65,332.

Trump managed to reverse this trend when he came into office, with 81,603 interior deportations in 2017 and 95,360 in 2018. But just as Obama had gutted interior enforcement before him, Biden did it as well. Now Trump is trying to rebuild the interior deportation infrastructure that they very purposefully sabotaged.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes $75 billion to help rebuild America’s deportation infrastructure, including $45 billion for new detention facilities, raising our detention capacity from today’s paltry 35,000 to 100,000. It also includes $10 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE personnel, including 5,500 deportation officers. And it includes $14.4 billion on transportation infrastructure to remove illegal immigrants from the country.

Even though these resources will not be available to ICE for some time, Trump’s DHS is already raising the pace of deportations far past where they were in his first term. According to unofficial numbers, between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 and April 1, DHS deported more than 100,000 illegal immigrants. Now, no breakdown on the arresting agency for these deportations was given, but considering that just 20,000 illegal immigrants were caught crossing the border in February and March, even if every one of those caught were deported, that means about 80,000 illegal immigrants were deported from the interior of the country in just two months, for an average of 40,000 deportations a month. 

If Trump can keep that pace of deportations up, that would mean close to 500,000 deportations a year from the interior of the country, a number that would shatter all deportation records.

No one really knows how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S., but the Center for Immigration Studies has one of the best and most consistent estimates out there. Using data from the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey (this is the same dataset that the Department of Labor uses to produce the monthly unemployment numbers), CIS estimates that by the end of the Biden administration, there were 15.8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and that 5.6 million of them entered during Biden’s presidency. 

At 500,000 deportations a year, Trump is not going to be able to undo completely the damage caused by Biden in just four years. It is going to take time. But even getting those numbers to start moving in the opposite direction would be a huge win for the country.

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Fewer illegal immigrants mean higher wages for American workers, especially those at the bottom of the labor market. It means cheaper housing as illegal immigrants no longer compete with Americans to drive up demand for our limited housing supply. And it means better education for our children, as less time and resources are wasted on non-English speakers in the classroom. 

Biden engineered the largest increase in America’s foreign-born population ever. We are a far more divisive and poor nation thanks to Biden’s immigration policies. Undoing the damage Biden caused won’t happen overnight. But on Day One, Trump stopped the bleeding, and now the numbers are moving in the right direction.