President-elect Trump is returning to the White House looking to dwarf his first term's significant impact on immigration policy.

Eight years after he first won the presidency, Trump has remolded the GOP's mainstream views on immigration, all but guaranteeing he will face less resistance in implementing his more extreme proposals.

But questions remain about the capacity of a new Trump administration — or of immigration enforcement agencies — to run a deportation program that lives up to his campaign promises.

Still, Trump’s first term brought deep behind-the-scenes changes to the immigration and border security systems, changes that took the Biden administration months to undo in some cases.

Trump’s new team is likely to quickly reinstate those policies, looking to pick up where they left off in 2021.

Border security

Trump left President Biden a border with relatively few unauthorized migrant encounters per month but primed to explode with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people bottlenecked south of the U.S.-Mexico line.

That bottleneck was exacerbated by quick expulsion policies such as Title 42, a measure Biden kept in place until 2023, drawing the ire of many in the immigration advocacy movement.

Title 42 and the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” were stalwarts of the Trump administration’s attempts to curb border crossings that Republicans routinely used as a cudgel to blame the Biden administration for the massive growth in unauthorized arrivals.

Those arrivals peaked with more than 300,000 migrant encounters last December.

Comparatively, there were nearly 74,000 encounters in December of 2020, Trump’s last full month in office, with Title 42 and Remain in Mexico in place, including 71,141 encounters between ports of entry.

In September of 2024, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported 101,790 encounters at the southwest border, 53,858 of which were reported by the Border Patrol between ports of entry.

That suggests the border under Trump was in some ways more porous than under Biden, with a broad majority of migrants evading ports of entry to turn........

© The Hill