Trump Team Focuses Deportations On Immigration Numbers, Not Criminals

Trump officials concede generating large numbers of deportations, not apprehending criminals, is the administration’s chief immigration goal. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said on several occasions the primary reason his administration would deport undocumented immigrants was to prevent them from harming Americans. However, a minority of undocumented immigrants have committed serious crimes, and most people without lawful status have lived in the United States for more than 10 years and have jobs and families. By setting arrest quotas for federal agents, Trump officials acknowledge the administration does not intend to prioritize deporting dangerous criminals.

Immigration Agents Given Arrest Quotas

Only days after Donald Trump became president, his deportation policy devolved into assigning arrest quotas, a bureaucratic feature analysts expected. According to Washington Post reporters Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been directed by Trump officials to aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500, because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation campaign so far, according to four people with knowledge of the briefings.”

Trump administration leadership told senior ICE officials that “each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable for missing those targets,” reported the Washington Post. “The orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics or face accusations of civil rights violations as they strain to meet quotas, according to current and former ICE officials.”

This emphasis on numbers over criminals was predicted in an earlier article: “A top priority for U.S. officials involved in the Trump administration’s deportation efforts will likely be to generate large numbers. Analysts expect efforts at targeting criminals or convicting a business owner in a workplace raid will be secondary to the bureaucratic goal of driving up deportation numbers.” (Stuart Anderson, Forbes, January 20, 2025)

Trump officials emphasized bureaucratic quotas in his first term. Shaul Schwarz, a filmmaker on the six-part Netflix documentary Immigration Nation, had unprecedented access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during the Trump administration. “I think we repeatedly saw a desire to get numbers,” he said in an interview in 2020. “I think anybody who works in ICE knows it because it was kind of everywhere we went. . . . We definitely saw a lot of agents wanting to hit numbers.”

Trump Says Immigration Priority Is Criminals Despite The Evidence

After recent raids in Chicago, Donald Trump said. “It’s going very well. We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out.” The Washington Post added, “Without evidence, he said: ‘These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen. We’re taking them out first.’”

Given that Trump, in and out of office, has highlighted serious crimes by undocumented immigrants, it appears unlikely that hundreds of cases of such individuals committing murders, particularly in one major city, would have escaped the attention of politicians and the media.

Policies Generate More Undocumented Immigration

The administration has determined one way to increase deportation targets is to remove legal protections from individuals who came to the United States through legal channels or remained lawfully, such as through Temporary Protected Status. “Protection from deportation may expire for up to 2.7 million people within the next two years,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. “The vast majority face dismal prospects if forced to return to their birth countries.”

The Trump administration is creating more undocumented immigrants by removing legal protections for those paroled in the country in recent years. One reason may be that many of these individuals could be easy to find, which can help drive up deportation numbers.

Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported on a DHS memo giving ICE agents “the ability to expel migrants in two major Biden-era programs that have allowed more than a million people to enter the country temporarily.” This includes migrants who entered lawfully after scheduling appointments via the CBP One app and more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who arrived in the United States with sponsors under humanitarian parole programs. Analysis showed the programs reduced illegal entry from the four countries by 98% over two years.

Immigration Arrest Quotas Part Of The Nature Of Bureaucracies

As discussed in a previous article, “Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.” When China instituted its one-child policy nationally, agents and bureaucrats at the local level carried it out by enforcing quotas and other numerical targets, according to Tyrene White, author of China’s Longest Campaign. The Trump administration’s immigration deportation campaign is following the same bureaucratic pattern.