President Trump renewed his ask for more funding to carry out his immigration agenda, including border security and “the largest deportation operation in American history” during his address to Congress Tuesday night.
Why it matters: Trump’s mass deportation plans are near-impossible to achieve without more money, which Democrats are likely to oppose. Trump Cabinet members, particularly border czar Tom Homan, have made a similar ask for weeks.
Zoom out: During the speech, Trump said he hoped to surpass the deportation record of “current record holder Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders” — a reference to Operation Wetback.
- That mass deportation, in the 1950s, used military-style tactics to round up 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the country for the-then largest deportation operation in U.S. history. “Wetback” is a racial slur for Mexicans.
- The president also celebrated new data on border crossings in February that showed they’d declined to their lowest level in decades.
Zoom in: Trump made his case for more funding by repeating messages from the campaign trail, including falsehoods about migrants and immigration policy.
- Trump repeated debunked claims about the immigrant population numbers in Springfield, Ohio and gang members occupying Aurora, Colo.
- He repeated that his predecessor, President Biden, had open borders into the country, which he did not.
- Trump also said that people who illegally crossed the border were “murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums” and invited several guests to underscore his anti-immigration message.
Reality check: There’s no evidence that immigrants trying to come into the country were from prisons and mental institutions.
- Immigrants commit fewer crimes than their American-born counterparts, studies have shown. But Trump and others have elevated individual cases that support their claims, like the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
- The 22,797 immigrants out of 43,759 — or 52.1% — currently held in ICE detention at the various locations across the country have no criminal record, data shows.
- Many more have only minor offenses, including traffic violations.
- Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.
Between the lines: Trump entered office at a time when U.S. immigration courts already are on pace to decide record numbers of deportation cases — and order the most removals in five years — under Biden’s push to fast-track asylum decisions.
- A backlog of 3.7 million cases in immigration courts, where immigrants are entitled to make their case to stay in the U.S., means detained immigrants can wait months, even years, for a hearing.
- Immigration courts are predicted to rule on 852,000 deportation cases from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, according to an analysis of data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
- If that pace continues, immigration judges will decide more deportation cases in 2025 than in any previous year on record.
The other side: Immigrant rights groups quickly denounced Trump’s rhetoric around “invasion” or immigrants coming from mental institutions.
- “It is vital that we remain vigilant against any hateful language that undermines the rich diversity and strength of democracy,” Hector Sanchez Barba, President and CEO of the left-leaning Mi Familia Vota said.
In the Spanish language response, U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) said Trump’s immigration policies are not designed to deport criminals who should be deported, “but to create a reign of terror that negatively impacts local economies.”
- The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said the president was acting “more like a king than like a president.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional comment from Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
