Trump delivers on promise to boot a million undocumented immigrants | Opinion
You might not have noticed, but there’s already more elbow room in Donald Trump’s America. More than a million immigrants have already left. The majority of them, it appears, were in the country illegally.
That meets the 1 million a year announced as the administration’s target by Vice President JD Vance, though it is far fewer than entered the country illegally under President Joe Biden.
A few days ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that 2 million immigrants have already left the United States under the Trump administration’s policies that are both tough and exactly as promised. Her previous claim in August met skepticism typified by PolitiFact’s ruling of “half true” while delivering a blizzard of quibbles with the number.
DHS numbers are based only on estimates. Some immigrants may not be answering survey questions honestly or at all from fear of deportation. Better yearly numbers will come out later. Yeah, I know, “Trump administration official exaggerates, film at 11.”
All that’s true, but none of the caveats and none of the exaggeration are big enough to undermine the fact that Trump has done just what he said he’d do.
Don’t take Noem’s word for it. You don’t have to believe a Trump administration official at all to believe something significant is underway and that Trump, for all his flaws and problems with the truth, is delivering on his promise.
The Trump administration number is based on a Trump-sympathetic Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the U.S. Census’ monthly Current Population Survey, which found more than 2 million immigrants have left the country, largely self-deports of 1.6 million undocumented immigrants. DHS adds to that more than 400,000 deportations of undocumented immigrants so far this year to get to its 2 million fewer illegal migrants claim.
The Pew Research Center, not home to a known Trump fan club, reached similar conclusions, releasing a report that found through June there were 1.4 million fewer foreign born people in the United States since Trump took office. Trump has had three more months to add to that number. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows a similar decline in the foreign-born workers.
To top that off, RealClearPolitics reported that another fact-oriented institution free of Trump administration meddling, the Congressional Budget Office, had started lowering U.S. population estimates in future years by millions of people, in part due to Trump’s immigration policies. They may have to lower their estimates even more as CBO still assumes that the U.S. immigrant population will grow this year, a rather unlikely outcome.
I am a fan of neither the masked agents marching through Chicago’s city streets scaring good people who are only trying to build a better life for their children, nor the masked thugs attacking police in ICE protests in Portland, but this is what Trump was elected to do.
He is tearing up a bipartisan policy of turning a blind eye to the somewhere between 10 and 20 million undocumented immigrants who have made America their new home in recent years. This after waves of millions of previous undocumented immigrants were legalized in the 1980s and 1990s.
For 25 years, the Democrats and the Republicans struggled and failed to address the issue while public resentment boiled over.
Democrats seemed too intent on catering to those who broke our laws with state-by-state efforts to give undocumented immigrants various forms of welfare, subsidized health insurance and education benefits. Republicans claimed to be different, but were too afraid of being called racists to rally strong opposition. Of course, Americans are fed up.
The result is one of the main reasons for the Trump earthquake remaking our politics. Maybe when Trump gets the job done, there will be less fuel for the populist fires sweeping our country.
This story was originally published September 29, 2025 at 3:21 PM with the headline "Trump delivers on promise to boot a million undocumented immigrants | Opinion."
