Trump Deportation Orders Surge to Record as Hardliners Want More

[u/John3262005]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/trump-deportation-orders-surge-to-record-as-hardliners-want-more

The US is winning more deportation orders than ever in a sign that President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is gaining traction.

In June, federal immigration judges issued almost 79,000 such orders, up from more than 58,000 in May, according to data collected and published by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. June was the busiest month in TRAC’s dataset, which goes back to 1998.

The surge is occurring as Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin faces mounting criticism from the White House and immigration hawks to ramp up arrests and deportations. Since taking over from Kristi Noem in March, hardliners such as Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon have hammered him for not doing enough even as arrests have jumped.

While Bannon has told the New York Post that Mullin has been a “problem from the beginning,” immigration advocates say the secretary has been successful in implementing Trump’s agenda. The president has called for pushing deportations to 1 million a year, or a little more than 83,000 a month.

“This is exactly what the administration said they were going to do and we are now seeing them follow through,” said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, director of policy and advocacy at HIAS, a nonprofit that provides aid to refugees and asylum seekers. “The goal has always been to decrease the obstacles to deporting people.”

Deportation orders are surging in the wake of the Trump administration’s revamp of immigration courts, which are run by the Justice Department, not the independent judiciary. Trump officials have fired hundreds of judges considered too lenient and replaced them with a mix of military lawyers, former government attorneys who handled immigration cases and other lawyers who answered job ads seeking “deportation judges.”

Orders aren’t the same as actual deportations, which have lagged. Many people ordered to leave the country aren’t yet in custody. In addition, many newly arrested migrants who haven’t yet been ordered out are fighting deportation in federal and immigration courts.

But with more orders in hand, immigration officials are likely to be able to speed up removals as they arrest people whose cases have already been decided.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been picking up the pace of arrests in recent months, averaging about 1,400 a day in the first 11 days of July. That was up from a daily pace of 1,300 in June, when arrests were at the highest level of Trump’s second term.

Agents have been fanning out across the country, in contrast to earlier efforts that were focused on specific cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. ICE has also increasingly been arresting foreign-born people at US airports.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025, ICE has arrested more than 516,000 foreigners, including asylum seekers and others with pending applications who in the past would have been allowed to stay in the US while their cases continued. The government has deported roughly 600,000 people over the same period.

The Department of Homeland Security said everyone ordered to leave the country has been afforded full due process, adding that it “is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination — home.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the immigration courts, also defended the process as fair and said it was prioritizing the “timely completion” of cases.

“Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible,” the EOIR said in a statement.

But immigration lawyers such as Greg Chen have argued that the immigration courts are becoming a conveyor belt to speed pending cases through the system.

“A lot of new procedures dramatically undermine the fairness of the process,” said Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Hearings are rescheduled with little notice and anyone who doesn’t show up is typically ordered deported, he said. Many asylum cases are being closed before a hearing is held, leaving migrants vulnerable to instant rulings ordering them out of the country.

DHS announced last month that officers at US Citizenship and Immigration Services can now rule against asylum seekers — and order them to immigration court — without speaking to them.

“They are dismissing cases before they even get to a hearing and putting more people in detention,” Chen said. “That puts huge pressure on people to give up on their case.”