President Donald Trump achieved unprecedented success in closing the U.S. southern border and undertaking a mass deportation operation throughout 2025.
After returning to the White House in January, the 47th president immediately implemented a series of executive actions aimed at securing the U.S.-Mexico border and equipping federal immigration authorities with the resources to locate and repatriate illegal migrants on a massive scale. These measures resulted in well over two million illegal migrants leaving the U.S. and southern border encounters at the lowest levels ever recorded in history.
There have been a total of 117,105 enforcement encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border since Jan. 21, the day Trump re-entered the Oval Office, according to Customs and Border Protection data, which does not include December’s numbers. To put this figure into perspective, the Biden administration averaged 185,625 encounters every single month.
“In just a few short weeks the Trump Administration managed to give Americans the gift of the most secure border since Eisenhower was our Chief Executive,” Matt O’Brien, deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“President Trump then followed that up with the only coordinated effort the U.S. has ever seen to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act the way that Congress wrote it — rather than in a manner calculated to pander to migrant groups,” O’Brien continued. “Both actions are examples of campaign promises kept.”
Trump declared an emergency at the southern border as soon as he returned to the White House, a move that allowed more federal resources, including the military, to be diverted to the region. He further bolstered border security by threatening Mexico with crippling tariffs unless its government took more action, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy thousands of Mexican troops to the region.
The Trump administration also immediately scrapped the CBP One App, an application used by President Joe Biden’s White House that allowed nearly one million asylum seekers to enter the country and attracted other foreign nationals to reach the border and make millions of attempts to book asylum appointments.
All of these actions ultimately resulted in incredibly low activity at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Border Patrol apprehensions have averaged under 10,000 per month, a level the administration described as “unmatched in modern border history.” Catch-and-release has effectively ended, with seven consecutive months of zero illegal migrants being released into the country by border officials.
“In less than a year, President Trump has delivered some of the most historic and consequential achievements in presidential history — and this Administration is just getting started,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a public statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are making America safe again and putting the American people first.”
As activity at the southern border reached historic lows, interior immigration enforcement increased dramatically. The Trump administration has worked to reach its ambitious goal of 3,000 daily Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests, with agents regularly hitting more than 2,000 arrests a day.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deported more than 622,000 illegal migrants since Trump’s second term began, according to the administration. Staring down the prospect of forced repatriation and attracted by several thousand dollars in incentives, another 1.9 million illegal migrants have chosen to self-deport during this time.
Many of the illegal migrant criminals apprehended occurred during targeted operations in major sanctuary cities, such as Midway Blitz in Chicago, Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, enhanced raids in the Los Angeles region and elsewhere. DHS was further enabled through more than 1,000 new enforcement cooperation agreements signed with local and state law enforcement agencies.
The combination of incredibly low border crossings and non-stop deportation raids across the country has resulted in the U.S. achieving negative net migration for the first time in half a century, a milestone the White House has framed as fulfilling a campaign promise to end the border crisis that began under the Biden era.
“The end result is that public safety, national security, and economic opportunity are all working in the interests of U.S. citizens for the first time in recent memory,” O’Brien said.
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