“ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
This odious caption was posted by the official White House account on X (formerly known as Twitter) on February 18th, 2025.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2025, his administration has unleashed a flurry of immigration-related executive orders, signaling a renewed and aggressive push to crack down on undocumented migrants in the U.S.
In more than 21 orders, Trump has moved to override parts of the U.S. immigration system, including how immigrants are processed and possibly deported from the country.
A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy, both in his first term and now, is mass deportation. The Department of Defense (DoD), led by Secretary Pete Hegseth, announced it would use military aircraft—such as the C-17 Globemaster cargo plane—to deport the over 5,000 migrants already detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas. At the same time, the newly appointed Executive Associate Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations, Tom Homan, now referred to as the “Border Czar,” declared that deportations would steadily ramp up as border enforcement intensifies.
Just four days into the new administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that more than 1,000 individuals had already been deported or repatriated on Thursday, January 23rd, 2025.
These deportation flights sparked diplomatic tension as Colombia’s government refused to allow two U.S. military planes carrying Colombian deportees to land, forcing the aircraft to return to the U.S.
Statistics represent the intensity of this situation. ICE made an average of 710 immigration arrests daily from Thursday through Monday, up from a daily average of 311 in a 12-month period through September under President Joe Biden or from a daily average of 376 arrests during Trump’s first presidency.
Deportation Trends
Arrests began to spike starting in January of 2025 and included highly publicized operations, including in the cities: Atlanta, Dallas and, most prominently, Chicago.
The Trump administration has highlighted the participation of other agencies in ICE operations, which is a departure from the Biden administration. They include the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—all part of the Justice Department—and the Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol.
Trump broadened ICE’s arrest priorities to include anyone living in the U.S. without legal status, and not just those with criminal convictions, national security ties, or recent border apprehensions. Even so, some observers say that, for now, ICE operations appear largely unchanged from previous enforcement patterns.
“There’s nothing unique about it,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which is a research and advocacy group that favors immigration restrictions.
He anticipates more enforcement and believes Congress will approve funding for up to 80,000 beds for detainees, around double the current level. ICE needs the space to hold people while any legal proceedings play out and during the process of arranging deportations.
Under Biden, ICE deported more than 270,000 people in a 12-month period that ended in September, 2024. That was the highest annual tally in a decade, helped by an increase in deportation flights.
Some of Trump’s executive orders were signed with the aim of expanding ICE’s ability to arrest and detain unlawful migrants on U.S. soil. One of them reverses a longstanding guideline that prohibited immigration raids in areas deemed “sensitive,” such as schools, hospitals and churches. Another calls for an expansion of a program that allows ICE to delegate its immigration enforcement duties to state and local police.
International Response
After Columbia refused to retake the deported Colombian nationals, in an episode that may signal more hardball diplomacy with rebellious governments, Trump said on January 26th, 2025, that he would raise tariffs by 25% on Colombia’s exports to the U.S.
Mexico is anticipating an influx of migrants from Trump’s deportation orders, and has started building giant tent shelters in nine border cities to temporarily house them.
Municipal official Enrique Licon of Ciudad Juárez – a city that borders El Paso, Texas – told Reuters on January 21st, 2025, that these shelters will be able to house thousands of people and should be ready in a few days, calling the effort “unprecedented.”
The shelters will provide people food, medical care and assistance in getting identification documents. A fleet of buses will also be ready to help transport Mexicans back to their hometowns.
It is part of a larger effort called “Mexico Embraces You,” a government-wide campaign to welcome citizens who may be deported from the U.S. and help them reintegrate in their home country.
Yet, Mexico remains wary of fully aligning with the Trump administration as officials have resisted openly endorsing the U.S.’s approach.
Trump’s aggressive stance on immigration is no longer a domestic issue alone, but it is also reshaping relationships across the Western Hemisphere. Countries that once depended on collaboration with the U.S. on migration and security are now being pushed into a corner, and forced to respond to policies they did not shape but must now absorb the consequences of.
Other nearby nations, like Guatemala, are launching similar efforts to absorb their deportees. But some have raised concerns about whether Mexico and other countries will be ready to handle the number of people that may be coming their way.
Many of the migrants are also fleeing political turmoil or criminal violence in their home countries, raising questions about whether they’ll be safe if they return.
The Blueprint
This all could have been prevented, as his current policies were all described in Project 2025.
Project 2025 is a product of the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most prominent right-wing think tanks. It first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was about to take office.
It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump first won the presidency. That’s not unusual – it’s common for U.S. think tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wish lists for future governments.
There’s no denying that Heritage has been influential during Republican presidencies. One year into Trump’s first term, the think tank boasted that the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals. Its latest set of recommendations was unveiled in April 2023, but went largely unnoticed outside of policy circles until the heat of the presidential campaign, when Democratic opposition to the document ramped up.
Democratic politicians launched a “Stop Project 2025 Task Force” and even set up a tip line to collect insider information on Heritage’s activities. The Harris campaign and its surrogates consistently brought up the project in interviews and speeches, leading Trump to actively push away from the document in July 2024.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
The team that created the project was chock-full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president. Dans later left the project.
But other Project 2025 authors have been welcomed into government jobs. Russell Vought, Peter Navarro, Brenden Carr, Adam Candeub, and a number of other people have landed in Trump’s administration.
Their return to government is no coincidence—it marks the quiet but deliberate implementation of the blueprint they helped draft. While Trump may distance himself from the document publicly, the presence of its authors in key positions suggests otherwise. What once appeared to be a hypothetical policy wish list is now becoming reality in real time, with consequences that stretch from immigration raids on U.S. soil to diplomatic standoffs abroad.
In many ways, Project 2025 was not just a warning; it was a playbook. And now, America is living out its chapters.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2025, his administration has unleashed a flurry of immigration-related executive orders, signaling a renewed and aggressive push to crack down on undocumented migrants in the U.S.