In his first 100 days in office, US President Donald Trump has barrelled ahead with his plan for one million deportations a year with 181 immigration-specific executive actions – six times the number he issued at the start of his first term. Trump is now trying to fuse all levels of the federal state apparatus into a single deportation machine, drafting services like healthcare, housing, social security and even the military into deportation activities. Now, migrants and even US citizens face increasing scrutiny.
Militarised borders
In March, Trump dispatched 10,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, declaring an ‘invasion’ of migrants, and in April handed the US Army control of the 170-square-mile Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that runs through New Mexico, Arizona and California at the border. These steps signal Trump’s intent to draw active-duty troops further into domestic law enforcement. Trump is also choking off routes to asylum. The CBP One phone app, the only means for desperate families to schedule appointments to arrive at a border port of entry, has been rebranded ‘CBP Home’ and repurposed to just reporting ‘self-deportations’. Border Patrol interceptions have fallen to 7,000 in March, the lowest monthly total since records began in 2000, but the drop is due to coercion. Mexico and Canada have each been strong-armed into reinforcing their sides of the border with National Guard troop under threat of tariffs.
Violent deportations inside the border
Inside the borders of the US, where 13.7 million undocumented people live and work, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) interior arrests have jumped from 310 to roughly 650 a day. Trump has been marshalling agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into immigration enforcement, lifting historical prohibitions on authorities accessing sensitive government databases such as those operated by the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services to locate undocumented migrants. Detention capacity, slashed under former president Biden, has risen from 41,500 to 54,500 beds, with even US occupied Guantánamo Bay in Cuba repurposed as an overflow jail. Even since, Congress has been asked to triple detention bed spaces.
ICE’s tactics have also become more harsh and indiscriminate. In several cases across the US, ICE agents have used violence to raid and subdue even US citizens:
- In April, ICE agents raided the home of a family of US citizens in Oklahoma, forcing family members including young girls in their underwear outside at gunpoint. Agents then left with the family’s life savings in cash, cell phones and other belongings as ‘evidence’.
- In April, ICE, the DEA, and the FBI stormed an underground nightclub in Colorado, violently arresting 100 suspected undocumented migrants in the raid.
- In May, Massachusetts police slammed a 16-year-old girl’s face into the pavement after ICE came to detain her mother.
- In May, ICE agents worked with the Tennessee Highway Patrol to arrest and detain 100 people, many at gunpoint, while separating children from parents.
Trump has also taken aim at the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, which grants temporary legal status to migrants in the US who may not be able to return to their native country due to conditions such as instability or environmental disaster, through which up to four million people arrived in the US under the Biden administration. The Trump administration has sought to end TPS for Haitians and Venezuelans, and end discretionary leave for more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Applications for green cards or asylum have been shelved and work permits lapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands in fear of imminent deportation.
Amid this reign of terror, the Trump administration is experiencing a shortage of enforcement personnel and equipment. As a result, military cargo planes are being deployed to ferry deportees, and local police are being deputised to perform immigration functions through ICE’s use of 287(g) agreements, which make formal the partnership between ICE and state or local law enforcement agencies.
Political detainment and deportation
The Trump administration is now cancelling visas for foreign students and threatening even those who have permanent legal status, specifically targeting those in the Palestine solidarity movement. Palestinian Columbia University student and activist Mohsen Mahdawi was detained for two weeks in ICE detention despite being a green card-holder and therefore a legal permanent resident. In another case, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, was detained for 45 days in retaliation for an article she co-wrote in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and the university’s response to the genocide in Gaza. In Washington DC, Dr Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was detained unlawfully by ICE in Texas for two months, targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage and her social media posts. In all cases, federal courts eventually ordered their release but they demonstrate a clear intent to use threats of deportation to repress those standing up for Palestine.
The White House vows to reach one million deportations a year yet its current pace of deportations suggests it will deport half a million people this year, fewer than Biden’s 685,000 deportations last year. Detention beds, court dockets and airline seats impose physical limits; every deportation requires paperwork, guards and fuel. Meanwhile, global crises keep pushing people north, and US employers keep advertising jobs that non-migrant workers will not fill at the offered wages. If Congress unlocks tens of billions for enforcement, Trump may inch closer to his target, but the human and fiscal cost will climb just as quickly. With these constraints, the Trump administration has set its sights on ‘sanctuary cities’ – cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies – with US ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan threatening ‘Wait till you see what’s coming’.
Despite this intensification, every public arrest has incited community protests across the US. As children of immigrants fear going to school and immigrant neighbourhoods shutter themselves inside to avoid arrest and detention, communities are standing up to protect their own. As the US is thrown into another economic crisis, these tactics are familiar: capitalism’s appetite demands an expendable labour force terrorised by periodic spectacles of removal – deportations. The people must continue their fightback against deportations and racist immigration policies.
Stop deportations now!
Soma Kisan
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 306 June/July 2025
