The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s subsequent expression have been a whirlwind of activity, with frequent stories and activity at the frontier, taxes, stormy markets, Expand, multiple lawsuits, and turbulent markets. This Washington Examiner line,” 100-Day Report Card”, will look at six key concerns and how they have come to define the early days of this administration. Immigration is the topic in Part 2.
President Donald Trump , who took office in January, swiftly followed through on his campaign pledge to close the southern borders, but he faces a difficult task in carrying out the “largest-ever” imprisonment activity of illegal immigrants.
Former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner Doris Meissner claimed that Trump has taken 175 significant immigration decisions since Jan. 20 — roughly 100 more than former President Joe Biden’s roughly 100 in the same time period.
In a conference with reporters on Thursday, Meissner, senior colleague at the Washington department of the Migration Policy Institute, said,” The speed and the power of immigration events have been much greater than most people would have anticipated.” ” The depth and the blow of what we are seeing are unparalleled”.
In his first few weeks in business, Trump declared a national crisis at the border, increased the number of federalized troops there, and ended” catch and release,” halted border wall construction, suspended immigrant settlement, curbed heritage citizenship, and blocked immigrants from seeking prison at the southern border.
The White House claimed that Trump’s swift actions since taking office’s first day in office contributed to the early results on the southern border.
” The American people delivered a resounding Election Day mandate to end the Biden administration’s border and illegal immigration nightmare”, White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in an email Friday. The Trump administration has been working with a whole-of-government approach to fulfill this mandate, which has led to record-breaking border encounters and the deportation of the most vile killers, rapists, traffickers, and other criminal illegal aliens from American soil.
Under Trump, the Trump administration has struggled to carry out its interior immigration operation despite the steep decline in the number of immigrants who were detained by Border Patrol while trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico.
Meanwhile, these past 100 days have not been without challenges for the Trump administration. The White House has experienced a number of setbacks in the court of law and public opinion, most notably in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran illegal immigrant who lives in Maryland and was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration in March.
Trump has not requested that the United States facilitate his return, and his administration has maintained that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang with a criminal record. Democrats have chosen to travel to El Salvador and advocate his return, albeit unsuccessfully.
A strategy to stop illegal immigration at the border
The Washington Examiner gave Trump an” A” for carrying out his promise to stop illegal entry between the entry points along the U.S. Mexico border based on comments from immigration analysts and a review of border statistics.
Border Patrol arrests of immigrants who illegally entered the country peaked at an all-time high of 250, 000 in December 2023. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded just 7,200 arrests in March.
The last time monthly figures were on average lower than the previous month was 55 years ago. The conservative-leaning Border Security Alliance championed Trump’s work on the border in such a short period.
The dramatic decrease in encounters since President Trump’s return to the White House is a testament to what we already knew: the Border Can Be Secure, according to BSA President Jobe Dickinson in a statement. Border Patrol agents can concentrate on halting the criminal cartel activity along the southern  , border, including the smuggling of drugs, people, and counterfeit goods, because these executive actions have significantly reduced the workload of Border Patrol agents.
The Washington Examiner has traveled to the border on dozens of occasions since 2018, but during its trip in February, its journalists did not witness a single immigrant attempting to cross the Rio Grande during a ride-along with Border Patrol.
Trump” successfully secured” the southern border, according to Daniel Di Martino, a legal immigrant from Venezuela who works as a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank in New York. However, whether it continues to be quiet along the 2, 000-mile boundary may be beyond his control.
What lies in the future is a little more uncertain interestingly because of tariffs, according to Di Martino in a message.” If the tariffs reduce U.S. economic activity as expected, they will reduce the incentive to come to America, but if they harm Mexico more, then perhaps even more people will attempt to come,” Di Martino wrote in a message. ” For now, I expect the U. S. economic slowdown to dominate, and so I believe border crossings will remain low this year”.
The only person to express concern was Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council in Washington, who noted that there is no substitute pathway for people fleeing persecution to enter the country. Refusing to allow immigrants to seek refuge could result in a backlog of people seeking assistance in 2029, when Trump will step down as president.
The lesson of the last ten months is that policies, dramatic short-term drops in migration, don’t necessarily work in the long term, Reichlin-Melnick said during a phone call on Friday.” We are three months into his presidency, and the lesson of the last ten months.
Arresting and removing illegal immigrants: B-
Trump has launched the “largest-ever” deportation operation in the United States, established a migrant camp there, flown immigrants out of the country using military cargo planes, and posted dozens of mug shots of illegal immigrants who have been detained since Jan. 20. He has also set up a migrant camp there.
Trump and JD Vance’s plans for a presidential election campaign started with the arrest and deportation of the 500, 000 to 1 million illegal immigrants with criminal records were promoted.
In addition to criminals, the Trump-Vance administration wants to remove the people who have already been ordered by a federal immigration judge to be deported.
According to White House border czar Tom Homan, about 1.4 million people have been deported and are still in the country as of last count, according to a press release on Monday.
The operation began on January 20 with the arrest of illegal immigrants all over the country, and it has grown ever more so since. It topped 2, 300 arrests in the first week.
The success of the operation can be compared to the number of immigrants who had previously been detained and removed from the country.
Between the years 2021 and 2024, immigration and customs enforcement made an average of 200 to 470 arrests per day, based on the year. A total of 500, 000 arrests occurred in that period.
Daily arrests ranged from 280 to 440 during Trump’s first term in office, or 548, 000 in four years.
The oldest government records indicate that arrests were most common during the Obama administration.  ,
In 2011, ICE detained an average of 882 illegal immigrants, which was the highest level of former President Barack Obama’s eight years in office.
In his first term, ICE detained 1.22 million people, up from 641, 000 in his second.
ICE lacks the funding to house as many immigrants in detention as the White House would like to arrest, with fewer than 47, 000 in custody at the moment.
Tricia McLaughlin, a top-secretary of homeland security, asserted that the Trump administration “deliveres beyond anyone’s expectations” in terms of border security and immigration enforcement.
More than 150, 000 illegal aliens were detained in under” 100 days under President Trump,” according to McLaughlin in a statement.
Public’s interest in immigration fades
Trump re-elected the U.S. Mexico border and immediately instituted a nationwide deportation operation, which earned him a 49 % approval rating for immigration among U.S. adults surveyed by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research between March 20 and March 24.
According to a weekly tracker run by YouGov, public concern about immigration has decreased significantly in recent months. In the past month, concern with civil rights and liberties has risen as more immigration coverage in the news has focused on individual immigrants’ rights under the Trump administration.
Democrats have grown particularly concerned about Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the government to remove someone with a terrorism affiliation without first bringing them before an immigration judge, he was taken away after ICE arrested him in mid-March. Abrego Garcia was wrongly removed to El Salvador despite his MS-13 gang affiliation, the Justice Department later admitted.
After the Supreme Court received the issue for a final decision later this spring, Trump put off enforcing his ban on birthright citizenship. Additionally, the Trump administration is preventing Venezuelan illegal immigrants from being deported. Most recently, the Supreme Court has stopped it from withholding federal funding from sanctuary cities.
Due to the sheer volume of news about immigration policy in the last 100 days, the public’s interest may have changed. According to MPI, three lawsuits against the Trump administration have already made it to the Supreme Court, out of the total of 50 filed against the Trump administration since January.
Trump scored higher in how he handled immigration in his first two months in office than any other issue, particularly trade and the economy, according to a national poll released 2 1/2 months into his term.
US-INTERNATIONAL TOURISM HAS A HIT UNDER TRUMP.
However, his support has started to change in his favor.
Four national , polls , conducted in April show that most of the public is no longer behind Trump, particularly when the White House has tried to keep the Abrego Garcia , storyline front and center in voters ‘ minds.
