US Border Patrol officers in Tijuana, Mexico, on December 2, 2018. Photo illustration
by Javier Zarracina/Vox; Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty
By the numbers: how 2 years of Trump’s policies have affected immigrants
The people directly harmed can be counted. The indirect effects can’t be.
By Dara Lind and Javier Zarracina Updated Feb 5, 2019, 4:38pm EST
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As Donald Trump gives his 2019 State of the Union speech, marking the completion of two years of his term, he’s done more to crack down on immigrants — both those seeking to come and those already here — than most presidents have done in four or eight.
Trump’s bombastic rhetoric on immigration and his stubborn insistence on building barriers along the US-Mexico border has distinguished him from his predecessors and led to a political realignment.
But the Trump administration’s impact on immigrants’ lives goes far beyond rhetoric and political fights.
Under Trump, the departments of Homeland Security (which oversees Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), Justice, and State have all taken steps to reduce the number of immigrants coming to the US — and make the lives of those who are already here more precarious.
More than 4000 people were sleeping in this tent encampment in Tijuana on November 23, 2018, hoping for political asylum in the US. Omar Martinez/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Refugee admissions have plummeted, while rejections of asylum applications have increased. Arrests of immigrants without criminal records have returned to the levels of the first term of the Obama administration, while Trump works to make hundreds of thousands more immigrants vulnerable to deportation, by stripping them of protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or Temporary Protected Status. And the travel ban quietly churns on.
We can’t do a full accounting of the lives that have been touched by Trump’s immigration crackdown. But here’s an attempt to start.
Enforcement: Immigration arrests per day have soared since 2016
“If you’re here illegally,” Trump’s first head of ICE, Tom Homan, told Congress in 2017, “you should be afraid.”
President Trump stands with Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas, on January 10, 2019. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
The Trump administration hasn’t engaged in the mass deportations Trump recklessly promised as a presidential candidate. It’s still working to reverse the de-escalation of the last two years of the Obama administration, and return to the “deporter-in-chief” levels of President Obama’s first term. But its policy of arresting and detaining as many unauthorized immigrants as possible is making its mark. Any way you slice it, more immigrants are more at risk than they were the day before Trump arrived.
436: The average number of daily immigration arrests under Trump between February 2017 and September 2018, including immigrants with and without criminal records, up from 300 in 2016, according to ICE statistics. Of that 436, an average of 139 arrests were of immigrants without criminal records, up from 47 in 2016.
44,631: The average daily population of people in ICE custody, as of October 20, an apparent record. It’s also about 4,000 more people than Congress has authorized ICE to keep at a time under current funding levels. That’s up from 34,376 in fiscal year 2016 (October 2015-September 2016), the pre-Trump record for detention.