Deportations down despite increased border enforcement in Trump's first month back in office

Nogales is one of the border ports that sees the highest number of deportations and returns, but Marcos Moreno Báez, Mexico's consul general in Nogales, Arizona, said the numbers of people being deported there has stayed within a typical range since Trump took office on Jan. 20.

"In fact, there has been a small decrease, a decrease of 10%, approximately, from Jan. 20 to today, in relation to the same period last year,” he said in Spanish on Feb. 24.

That includes migrants being apprehended crossing the border unauthorized and those who have lived in the U.S. for some time.

That is consistent with nationwide numbers. In the first month of Trump taking office, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said that nearly 14,500 people had been returned to Mexico, which is comparable to this time last year and slightly less than last year’s monthly average.

The Mexican government set up services in Nogales in preparation for people being deported, including shelter for about 2,500 people. But on a single day last week, there were only 44 people at the shelter.

Moreno Báez says there’s an average of 80 people a day being deported through Nogales, but many people just pass through, returning to where they’re from or where they have family.

Part of why deportations and returns are so low is because February is turning out to be a record low for unauthorized border crossings.

Moreno Báez says Mexico’s investment in social programs in Central American countries as well as increased enforcement at the country’s southern border have also led to decreased numbers of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Which also played a role in the more than 45% decrease in border apprehensions during Biden’s last year in office. But as well numerous sources say has also led to an increase in human rights abuses in Mexico.

Despite unauthorized border crossings being so low, immigration-related detentions in the U.S. have slightly increased since Trump took office, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to deportations.

As of last week there were nearly 44,000 detainees with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, about a 10% increase since the week before Trump took office, which Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh with the Migration Policy Institute says is either at or sometimes over capacity. She says arrests and removals away from the border take a lot more time and resources.

“Deportations are incredibly costly, resource intensive, and difficult to carry out, and so it's really hard for the government to sort of keep pace with deportations in the same way,” she said.

Whether detained people get held, deported or eventually released in the U.S. typically depends on a multitude of factors, including whether they have legal representation, a legal alternative to deportation, and if they’re from a country they can’t easily be deported back to, or if they’re not priorities and so get released from lack of space.

Putzel-Kavanaugh says we have not seen this sort of all-of-government approach towards immigration enforcement or national security since 9/11.

“It's based on a narrative of invasion that just really isn't based in reality,” she said.

Nearly 500 active-duty soldiers were deployed to Fort Huachuca earlier this month to support military operations at the border. This was part of about 16 hundred active-duty personnel that Trump had sent to the border earlier this year and in addition to the nearly 25 hundred service members already working with Customs and Border Protection.

As well, Mexican President Sheinbaum said she would send 10,000 more Mexican National Guard members to secure the border, as part of an agreement to delay 25% tariffs on U.S. imports, 400 of which arrived in Nogales earlier this month.

Volunteers with the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans pass out supplies to women and children at a migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, on Feb. 4, 2025.

Danyelle Khmara

Volunteers who do humanitarian aid work where migrants cross in the desert say they have seen very few people crossing. What they do see is an influx of marked and unmarked Border Patrol vehicles driving around near the border.

A CBP spokesperson says it is partly because of this increased enforcement that unauthorized crossings are so low.

Migrants at the border, many who are fleeing unsafe situations, are hearing that access to asylum has been completely cut off and are either trying to make lives in Mexican border towns or figuring out where else they can go, like Marina Barraza, who came to the border with her three children from Sinaloa after a young man she worked with was killed in the street.

She brought documentation of what she fled to try and make an asylum claim in the U.S., but after Trump took office, she didn’t see any way she could access asylum and so decided to make a life for herself and her children in Nogales.

"Well, I have to adapt,” she said in Spanish. “I have to adapt. I already found a job. You have to find a new way of living. And well, you have to stay here. You can't go back there anymore, and well, you can't return to a place where, you know, there is danger, especially for the children."

She has seen other migrants in similar situations plan to stay, to go home, find a new place to live — or a few still plan to cross unauthorized.

Putzel-Kavanaugh with the Migration Policy Institute says another reason for lower deportation numbers is that the administration’s effort to make enforcement measures highly public could be having a chilling effect on communities.

“ICE going into all of these places, even if they're not carrying out arrests, just the presence of ICE can be really chilling,” she says. “And so I think that, you know, that's also serving kind of the ultimate goal of the administration as well — is to be highly visible, and in some ways, whether that's instilling fear or making people potentially want to self-deport, or any other sort of means to that end, I think that that's also part of the strategy of the administration.”

In Tucson there have been numerous reports of ICE going into businesses and homes wanting to see immigrants’ paperwork, but few of those reported have led to actual arrests. ICE is refusing to give numbers on arrests locally, but groups who work with migrants and asylum seekers say people have been afraid to leave their homes.

A CBP spokesperson says a year and a half ago, when someone crossed the border and saw Border Patrol, they were happy because they would be processed and released. Now, they know it means they will be removed.

Biden began cutting off access to asylum a year and a half ago, while simultaneously creating new but limited legal pathways. Trump increased enforcement and cut off the legal pathways that did exist.

Putzel-Kavanaugh, the migration policy expert, said the increase in personnel is meant to make a statement.

“And likely to act as a deterrent agent if people are seeking to cross the border, there's still a lot of questions as to how people are being processed. Are they able to access any sort of humanitarian protection that would protect them from being returned to a place that they have a fear of returning to?”

She says this process is the U.S.’s legal obligation under international treaty and domestic law.