Think Immigration: The Reality of Trump’s Immigration Policies by the Numbers

As many turn their attention to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, President Donald Trump is expected to use the 2026 State of the Union to defend his immigration crackdown. But the numbers tell a very different story. Instead of broad public approval, 60% of Americans now disapprove of his immigration approach, according to a new NBC News poll — a double-digit drop since last summer. While the President prepares to claim victory, public confidence is moving in the opposite direction.

Last year, Congress approved a $170 billion immigration enforcement package, a sum larger than what all 50 states combined spend on policing every year. Meanwhile, the portion that has been appropriated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), exceeds the budgets for all other non-immigration federal law enforcement functions put together. Less than 8% of that $170 billion is appropriated for immigration courts, where cases are supposed to be decided by an impartial judge and people have their day in court; currently nearly 3.4 million cases are pending in immigration courts across the nation, while the Trump Administration fires and pushes out judges en masse. By any measure, the Trump Administration is failing the American people and undermining the national interest in every area of immigration.

The reality is that the administration is detaining mostly noncriminal immigrants, often for long periods, in a system where deaths and abuse are rising. Approximately 68,000 are in ICE detention in February, up about 75% from when Trump took office in 2025. Of those tens of thousands of vulnerable people, just 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants detained by the administration in 2025 had charges let alone convictions for violent criminal offenses.

Compounding the harm being done under the conditions in detention, deaths in custody continue to rise. Thirty two people died in ICE custody in 2025, a two-decade high, and at least 7 people died in January 2026. At least one of the deaths has been characterized as a homicide. Tragically, at least 3 U.S. citizens have been killed by immigration officers. Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on January 7 in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti was shot and killed by Customs and Border Protection officers on January 24 in Minneapolis after stepping in to help a woman an agent had pushed to the ground. And, in the last few days, news has come to light that on March 15, 2025, Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. Citizen was killed by a Homeland Security Investigations officer in South Padre Island, TX.

The havoc and harm occurring in communities continues as the Administration tries to hit their self-imposed quotas. In an effort to remove people even more quickly, the Trump administration paid five foreign governments tens of millions of dollars to accept migrants with no connection to those countries. Meanwhile, another way to hit those numbers is to make people who had legal status into undocumented targets for removal – they’ve done so to 1.6 million immigrants, upending the lives of immigrants who came into the United States “the right way.”

The Trump Administration is trying to increase the number of people being detained by circumventing longstanding policies and Constitutional protections. Vast numbers are being detained despite the legal requirement that they have a chance for bond. At least 20,000 federal lawsuits have been filed on behalf of immigrant detainees since Trump took office.

In case after case, federal judges appointed by both parties agree that these mass detentions violate the law. Since October 2025, more than 400 federal judges have ruled at least 4,421 times that ICE is holding people illegally. To be clear, federal judges aren’t just toeing their ‘party’ line. 44 Trump-appointed judges have ruled against the administration in mass-detention cases. A minority, 20 Trump-appointed judges, have signed off on the policy.

Even with these judges ruling so clearly against the Administration, ICE has a documented pattern of ignoring court orders or making misrepresentations to judges. In Minnesota, the chief federal judge documented 96 court orders that ICE violated in 74 cases in January 2026 alone, prompting him to warn that ICE may have broken more court orders in one month than some agencies do in their entire history. The Cato Institute documented 19 instances of when the administration failed to comply with court orders in immigration-related cases nationwide and 24 instances of when the administration misrepresented facts to judges in immigration-related cases nationwide.

Adding insult to injury, the Administration is firing immigration judges, further constricting the due process available for immigrants. The Trump administration has fired or forced out nearly 100 immigration judges in 2025 alone, an unprecedented purge aimed at reshaping the courts to speed deportations. And they are hiring more ‘deportation judges’ to fill the newly open slots – with deportation in their job title, what do you think their priority will be? A fair day in court? Probably not.

And let’s be honest, beyond just the human damage of mass deportation policies, if you need the economic argument, here it is: they are destabilizing the economy & devastating key industries. 98,000 fewer employed hospitality workers from December 2024 to December 2025. A $1.2 billion decline or a 5.5% drop in tourism revenue from September 2024 to September 2025. International visitors to the U.S. declined by 2.5 million in 2025, even as international tourism increased around the world. The San Francisco Federal Reserve study found that declines in unauthorized immigration have a near one-for-one effect on employment growth, with construction and manufacturing among the most affected sectors.

As President Trump stands before the nation and claims he is “winning” on immigration, remember the numbers.

Public disapproval is rising. Detention is surging. Deaths in custody are increasing. Courts are repeatedly finding unlawful conduct. Judges are being pushed out. Communities and industries are destabilized.

This is not what success looks like. And it is certainly not what constitutional governance requires.

Congress should recognize what the American people already have: this approach is failing. It is Congress’s responsibility — and constitutional obligation — to reassert oversight, restore guardrails, and ensure that immigration policy reflects both the rule of law and our national interests.

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These key data points in bulleted form are available via this link.