With President Donald Trump’s second term about to cross the 100-day mark, the White House is pointing to precipitous drops in illegal border crossings and a spate of interior enforcement actions as evidence that Trump is keeping his promise to crack down on illegal immigration and reverse his predecessor’s policies while re-instituting harsh measures to deter asylum seekers and other refugees.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and White House “border czar” Tom Homan used an early morning briefing with reporters to take a victory lap over what Leavitt called “extraordinary” results in deterring migrants from crossing into the United States or remaining there using harsh and legally creative methods that are testing the bounds of presidential authority.
Leavitt declared that the country’s borders “are now secure because of President Trump,” who she credited with having “restored the rule of law, enforced our immigration laws and defended America's sovereignty” by way of declaring a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border at the outset of his second term and making use of the American military to take control of land along the border. She also blamed Trump’s predecessor, former president Joe Biden, for what she described as “weakness in open border policies” that had “allowed vicious cartels to functionally control through a campaign of terror, rape and brutal force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border.”
Trump, she said, “put a stop” to the Biden policies “in record time” by ordering the State Department to designate drug cartels and two Latin American gangs — the Salvadoran gang known as Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — as foreign terrorist organizations, and by invoking a 1798 law purporting to allow federal authorities to seize and summarily deport any Salvadoran or Venezuelan national deemed to be a member of either group.
“The Trump administration is working 24/7 to successfully arrest and deport these illegal criminals and foreign terrorists from our communities. We are in the beginning stages of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history,” she said.
Homan, a former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during the first Trump term whose White House title is Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, followed Leavitt to the White House lectern and slammed Biden as “the first president in the history of this nation who came in office and unsecured a border on purpose.”
Echoing the conspiratorial rhetoric of Elon Musk and right-wing commentators, Homan claimed that the Biden administration’s use of alternatives to immigration detention for asylum seekers was a deliberate delaying tactic to allow them to avoid a timely hearing on their asylum claims — and to avoid being detained pending removal when those claims failed.
In what appeared to be an allusion to the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory which posits that elites are deliberately allowing hordes of nonwhite migrants into the U.S. so they will outnumber native-born Americans of European descent, the “border czar” said the Biden administration was driven by a desire to help the illegal migrants remain in the country for as long as possible until “another Democratic administration” could enact an “amnesty” provision into law that would provide a path to citizenship.
“This is about selling this country off for future political power. That's what it was,” he said.
But when pressed on how Trump’s “emergency” measures are justified if the number of border crossings has dropped as much as the administration says it has, Homan pivoted to saying that the emergency was not about an “invasion” as Trump had previously claimed as much as it was about stopping fentanyl trafficking.
He added that the “emergency” would not end until drug cartels were “wiped off the face of this earth.”
The early morning press conference is part of an administration push to highlight what officials describe Trump’s successful first 100 days on immigration and economic policies, even though recent opinion polls show the president’s approval rating is underwater with voters on both immigration and the economy — two issue areas where he once held commanding leads with voters.
One recent New York Times-Siena College poll found that less than half of Americans — 47 percent — approve of the way Trump is handling immigration. Another survey from ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos pegged his overall approval rating at 39 percent, which is the worst result for any American president at the 100-day mark since the rise of modern polling after the Second World War.
Still, the 47 percent of Americans who approve of Trump’s immigration record remains a relative strength for the president even as Americans sour on his work in other areas, particularly as concerns the economy.
To highlight his border crackdown, White House staff arranged for reporters arriving for work there on Monday to be greeted with a series of large posters staked into the North Lawn in strategic positions where they’d be seen by television cameras set up for journalists to deliver live reports.
The posters depicted illegal immigrants who the White House have chosen to highlight as examples of what they have described as an illegal immigrant-driven crime wave even though criminal justice and immigration experts have long determined that immigrants, legal or otherwise, commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
Each poster features the word “ARRESTED” above an immigrant’s mugshot and the crime they are accused of committing. Instead of names, the posters say “illegal alien” under each mugshot.
Homan told reporters that the administration has identified “about 700,000” such immigrants who are facing criminal charges or have been convicted of crimes and are prioritized for removal as a result.
“That’s what we’re looking for now ... national security threats,” he said.
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