President Donald Trump is closing out the week with troops on the border, immigration officers launching raids and more immigrants at risk of deportation.
Trump promised voters his first day in office would see mass deportations bigger than any in American history. While things didn’t happen that quickly, he set in motion efforts to follow through on his pledge.
The result has been heightened fear in immigrant communities, cheers from supporters, announcements from city and state officials staking out the roles they will play in assisting — or not — with immigration enforcement, and multifront legal fights over Trump’s actions and executive orders.
The week started with Trump rescinding the executive orders that President Joe Biden enacted on immigration, including those that built legal pathways for record numbers of migrants arriving at the border in recent years. Trump also signed a slew of his own, most prominently declaring an emergency on the U.S. southern border and seeking to stop children born in the U.S. to some immigrants from gaining automatic American citizenship, the latter of which a federal judge temporarily blocked.
On Thursday, some of the 1,500 Army and Marines personnel the Department of Defense announced would be sent to the southwest border arrived in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego. On Friday, two massive C-17 military cargo planes shuttled people who migrated from Guatemala out of the country. ICE was also making a show of force with arrests around the country, most visibly workplace raids in Newark, New Jersey, which included the questioning and detaining of U.S. citizens.
“President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X.
Though mass deportations didn’t materialize on Day 1 as Trump vowed, he has “strategically laid the groundwork for scaling up capacity and bringing in additional agencies for more detention and removals than the prior administration,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank that supports immigration reform.
Military troops are limited to support roles on the border, and some of the people arrested were detained or targeted during the Biden administration, but Trump’s initial steps have sent a resounding message, Ruiz said.
“Militarization of the border has an important and direct effect on sending an important message to migrants and to other countries that the United States is trying to do more to seal the border,” he said. “We know that in practice sealing the border is very difficult … but the messaging matters a lot because it shows migrants there will be more presence, it will be more difficult to cross.”
More arrests, more manpower
According to ICE, officers arrested 593 immigrants on Friday. Arrests this week took place in 19 cities across the country in states including Illinois, Utah, California, Minnesota, New York, Florida and Maryland.
This is almost double the number of arrests from September 2024, the latest month for which data is available, in which ICE arrested 282 migrants per day.
Trump gave immigration officers more latitude on where they can show up to make arrests, and he started to follow through on his pledge to use other federal agencies and personnel to seek out, arrest and remove immigrants from the country.
The Trump administration rescinded a long-standing policy prohibiting ICE from arresting undocumented people at schools, churches and hospitals or certain events such as weddings and funerals without prior agency approval. The decision sets up possible confrontations with teachers, school administrators, pastors and health workers who want to protect students, congregants and patients.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday gave authority to law enforcement officers in agencies within the Department of Justice to investigate and arrest people not legally in the country. It gave that power to the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
“Mobilizing these law enforcement officials will help fulfill President Trump’s promise to the American people to carry out mass deportations. For decades, efforts to find and apprehend illegal aliens have not been given proper resources. This is a major step in fixing that problem,” DHS said in its statement.
ICE said 373 of its arrests on Thursday included people who had committed serious crimes such as sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault. ICE also arrested 165 people not convicted of crimes or who have been accused of lesser violations such as crossing the border illegally.
Troops at a quieter border
A U.S. official told NBC News that Border Patrol had seen a drop in encounters this week. On Jan. 22, there were 843 encounters compared to an average of 1,552 per day in December.
Ruiz said data from Mexico shows that the number of border crossings was already dropping under Biden and had reached about the same levels Trump was seeing in the final months of his first term.
Trump “inherited a relatively quiet border from the Biden administration,” Ruiz said.
But keeping with Trump’s promise to crack down on immigration — which drew increased support during the election cycle — the administration dispatched military cargo planes to deport migrants.
Two defense officials told NBC News that two military planes and one nonmilitary plane flew immigrants to Guatemala.
Guatemala’s government said it had received three flights from the U.S. containing Guatemalan nationals Friday morning, two with 80 people and another with 105. The three flights were received in Guatemala City.
Earlier in the week, the Trump administration cut off a path for legal entry for migrants who were waiting in Mexico for scheduled appointments to request asylum or were trying to schedule such appointments.
Their hopes were dashed when Trump shut down the CBP One mobile app set up by Biden as a way to curtail the large groups of people crossing the border illegally, surrendering to Border Patrol agents and asking for asylum.
Trump also reinstated what is informally called the “remain in Mexico” policy, which forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their asylum hearings are held. Mexico’s foreign minister said there is no agreement with the U.S. to reinstate the policy.
As a result, some non-Mexican migrants waiting in Mexico are seeking asylum there, Ruiz said.
Three southern border sheriffs who spoke to NBC News said they had not yet seen differences in their day-to-day operations, including responding to reports of migrant arrivals and smugglers in their areas.
“It is still happening. We are not unrealistic to think everything is cleaned up, no problem,” said Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Dannels, who said his team responded to a human smuggling attempt on Tuesday. He said news of Trump’s arrival in office is being met with relief in his county.
However, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, Sheriff David Hathaway said he’s doing as much as he can to signal to his mostly Latino community that they can still report safety concerns, regardless of their immigration status.
Some law enforcement officials fear immigrants will be reluctant to report crimes or assist officers in investigating them with witness accounts or testimony for fear they could be detained and deported.
Whether Trump’s immigration crackdown further reduces border crossings will depend on whether migrants get tired of waiting in Mexico for something to change, or are pressured by cartels to try other routes, MPI’s Ruiz said.
“All the restrictions that are being placed on the border are going to have a direct impact in reducing the millions of dollars the cartels and smugglers make,” he said. “They are somehow likely going to respond to push migrants through to other, more dangerous routes.”
