Five ways Trump has changed immigration in the US

**Five ways Trump has changed immigration in the US**

Immigration has long been at the heart of Donald Trump’s message.

When he made his famous appearance on the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to launch his first presidential campaign, he blamed Mexico for sending drugs and crime across the border northward — a theme he has repeated ever since.

Some of his first-term plans to reduce the number of would-be immigrants were limited by the courts.

In his second term, though, those limits have been weaker, thanks to a more supportive Supreme Court and tens of billions of extra enforcement dollars from Congress.

Who gets to live in the US is still a major concern for voters heading into the upcoming midterm elections, which are widely viewed as a verdict on the Trump presidency.

He campaigned successfully in 2024 on promises of a sealed border and mass deportations, and few would dispute that he has delivered on both.

Still, even some supporters of a tougher approach worry the crackdown has gone too far.

His defining policy has unfolded in five main ways.

Crossings surged during Joe Biden’s presidency, with more than 4.5 million migrant “encounters” recorded at the southern border in 2023 and 2024 alone, reflecting the huge numbers of people moving north toward the US border.

His administration eventually cut the monthly totals sharply by limiting asylum claims and removing migrants who entered the US illegally without processing.

When Trump returned to office, that flow turned into a trickle. Border encounters fell dramatically.

By the end of Trump’s first year back in office, the chaotic scenes that had made headlines around the world during the Biden administration had largely disappeared.

On a visit to the border city of El Paso, Texas, in November 2025, for instance, the BBC found quiet streets where there had once been makeshift camps holding thousands of migrants granted parole in the US while they waited for immigration proceedings.

To deliver what he often calls the “most secure” border in US history, the Trump administration has used an aggressive, multi-pronged strategy.

That has included effectively freezing asylum applications at the border, ending “catch and release” of detainees into the US, sending troops to the border and pressuring Mexico to crack down on migrants heading north.

“President Trump promised the American people a secure border, and the data proves he delivered,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement on 16 October.

“The results could not be clearer: strong enforcement works.”

A pledge to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the nearly 2,000-mile (3,218km) US-Mexico border was one of the signature promises of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Work on it has accelerated in his second term, helped by $46.5bn (£34.7bn) in new funding from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” spending bill.

About 644 miles of “primary wall” — closest to the border — were already in place before Trump returned to the White House, along with 75 miles of “secondary” wall set a little farther inside the US.

Since then, another 250 miles of new wall have been finished, including primary, secondary and waterborne barriers, as well as technology designed to detect illegal crossings. A further 1,443 miles of barriers are now under construction.

Experts, however, say the reality of what has been built is more complicated than simply improved or updated wall sections.

The wall’s actual effect on wider immigration numbers is also disputed.

“Since new wall construction has really begun in earnest, there has been no significant change in the number of people crossing the border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration enforcement expert at the American Immigration Council.

He added that there is no sign the border wall has cut migrant crossings, saying the decline has been driven more by Trump’s policies and messaging.

Trump, meanwhile, still points to the wall as a success — and still says Mexico paid for it.

“I’m the King of the Wall,” Trump said at a rally in Kentucky on 17 October. “By the way, Mexico did pay for that wall. I charged them tariffs and I charged them costs like they’ve never paid in history.”

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Much of the attention generated by Trump’s immigration policies has come from inside the US, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations to detain people they say are in the country illegally have shaken cities nationwide.

During the campaign, Trump promised to begin immediately what he called the “largest deportation operation in American history”, with officials saying it would start with people who had committed crimes.

Arrests — and the detentions that followed in immigration facilities — have risen sharply since Trump returned to office, including a record nearly 50,000 in July this year alone, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

But the same data, external shows that a large share of those arrests involve people without criminal convictions. In July 2026, detentions of immigrants with criminal histories fell to an all-time low of 27%.

Deportations have also increased sharply. By mid-July this year, ICE was removing an average of 1,255 people a day, compared with about 770 in Biden’s final months in office — although Biden’s own removals had risen sharply in his final year.

But ICE tactics in US cities have made many Americans uneasy, including many who generally supported tighter restrictions. That became even clearer after Operation Metro Surge, a two-month large-scale enforcement operation in Minneapolis in early 2026 that left two US citizens dead.

, external released on 21 October found that 50% of voters trust Democrats to handle the issue, compared with 46% for Republicans — despite immigration traditionally being a Republican strength.

, external in late September found deep divisions among Republicans on the issue, with 31% of non-MAGA Republicans — meaning those not aligned with Trump’s movement — saying the campaign has become too aggressive.

After returning to the White House last year, Trump almost immediately suspended refugee admissions, saying at the time that they could only resume if they were shown to be in the US national interest.

In February, however, an executive order signed by Trump narrowly reopened the process for Afrikaners from South Africa, whom the White House has repeatedly said are being killed and “persecuted” — a claim denied by the government in Pretoria.

The refugee cap for fiscal year 2026 was first set at 7,500, then raised to 17,500 in May this year because of what the administration called an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation”.

Overall refugee admissions have slowed to a near trickle. State Department data shows that 16,292 refugees were admitted to the US in fiscal year 2026 — 16,287 of them South African.

By comparison, in the final two fiscal years of the Biden administration — 2023 and 2024 — 60,000 and 100,000 people entered the country, respectively. In fiscal year 2024, the largest numbers came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Syria and Venezuela.

Hundreds of thousands of people who had been protected from deportation lost that protection when Trump’s second term also ended a humanitarian safeguard called Temporary Protected Status (TPS). It allowed vetted people to live and work in the US if their home countries were considered unsafe to return to.

One of those countries was Haiti. In June, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for about 350,000 Haitians in the US.

Other legal routes to live and work in the US have also been tightened through a range of policy changes.

Dozens of countries the Trump administration has labeled security risks have faced full or partial visa and travel freezes.

Stricter vetting and new rules requiring people already living in the US to return to their home countries to apply for green cards have slowed that process.

And in September 2025, a $100,000 fee on new H1-B visas for skilled workers — mostly held by Indians — stunned the US tech industry. In May this year, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said on X, external that registrations for 2027 were down 40%.

“The data is a clear sign that the days of abusing the program with mass, low-wage registrations are over, and that the program is better serving its intended purpose of attracting highly skilled foreign workers and protecting the wages, working conditions and job opportunities of American workers,” the statement said.

Although a court has blocked the $100,000 fee for now, the threat of it appears to have discouraged employers. But some experts have warned that the administration’s goal of protecting American jobs, raising wages and stopping companies from outsourcing may be hard to achieve.

One study from the Wharton School of Business, external found that the H1-B changes would have “no significant impact” on the wages of US-born workers, with any drop in competition offset by slower productivity growth.

Other routes to the US have been opened, though — if you have a spare million.

The “Trump Gold Card”, launched in 2025, aimed to attract wealthy foreigners to live in the US in return for a $1m “gift” to the US government, plus a non-refundable $15,000 application fee.

At the time, Trump said the programme would strengthen the US economy. So far, however, it appears to have attracted very little interest. By April, only one applicant had been accepted.