Over the course of his historic 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump repeatedly pledged to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, with great emphasis laid on targeting the at least 12 million illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. under the presidency of Joe Biden. Polls and surveys consistently ranked immigration one of the top two issues worrying Americans, alongside inflation and the cost of living, and Republican voters in particular turned out in droves to deliver Trump both the electoral college and the popular vote, largely on the strength of the pledge of mass deportations.

While immigration enforcement efforts (particularly interior enforcement efforts, as opposed to simply expedited removals at the border) have increased significantly since Trump returned to the White House in January of 2025, deportations have not yet approached the “mass” qualification the president promised. By the end of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had reported over 600,000 deportations during the first year of the second Trump administration, in addition to over one million self-deportations.

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), however, DHS had successfully deported fewer than 300,000 illegal immigrants, while The New York Times reported that only 230,000 had been deported, with the bulk of DHS’s touted 600,000 deportations coming from expedited removals at the border. The number of illegal immigrants arrested and currently held in detention, awaiting deportation and often fighting it in court, is much higher, but still fewer than 600,000, as of December. According to the Deportation Data Project, shifts in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest and detention policy have resulted in a 25% increase in completed deportations within 60 days of an arrest, but the chances of being deported still hover just below 70%.

While ICE arrests have increased, from a daily average of 600 arrests in the first few months of the second Trump presidency to over 1,100 as of early 2026, DHS only managed to complete the deportation of 36,000 illegal immigrants between October 1 and the end of February, averaging about 7,200 completed deportations per month. Should that trend persist, DHS would have succeeded in deporting fewer than 87,000 illegal immigrants by the end of 2026. Much of the failure to deliver on the promised deportations has been attributed to former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was replaced in the role by former Senator Markwayne Mullin late last month, and mixed messaging on the issue from White House officials and ranking Republicans.

Under new leadership, DHS and ICE have continued conducting surprise immigration raids, but with a lower profile than those conducted under Noem’s tenure. In one recent operation in Pennsylvania, ICE asked non-domiciled commercial truck drivers to renew their commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) and promptly arrested the illegal immigrants who showed up, including one who resisted arrest and assaulted a local law enforcement officer. In Washington state, ICE agents also invited illegal immigrants to immigration appointments at DHS facilities outside operating hours, arresting those who showed up. ICE agents in Chicago have also made arrests at domestic violence court hearings.

While low-profile immigration raids are a step in the right direction, experts urge the Trump administration to take further action to deliver on the promise of mass deportations. Andrew R. Arthur, resident fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and a former immigration judge, has suggested “briefcase immigration enforcement,” targeting U.S. employers who hire illegal immigrants, as an effective tool. “Scenes of street arrests by immigration officers in Minneapolis and other major cities led to protests bordering on riots and became the purported justification for a … funding shutdown of DHS,” he wrote, adding that “there is a safer and more efficient way to turn off the ‘jobs magnet’ that draws aliens illegally to the United States and to deport those here unlawfully: worksite enforcement.”

Arthur noted that much of early U.S. immigration law was crafted to preserve the American jobs market for U.S. workers. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows for the removal of immigrants who come to the U.S. to work without authorization and non-immigrants (i.e. those who do not intend to remain in the U.S. indefinitely) who work without authorization, but the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 also makes it illegal for U.S. employers to hire illegal immigrants. “The first section of IRCA added a new section 274A to the INA, which requires employers to verify that new workers are eligible to work in this country in an effort to weed out aliens who weren’t authorized for employment,” Arthur observed. “The … Homeland Security Investigations Directorate (HSI) at ICE, has been given responsibility to police employers’ compliance with the section 274A verification requirements, an effort that has long been impeded by the fact that the employer isn’t required to send completed I-9s to DHS.” Form I-9, also called the “Employment Eligibility Form,” asks new hires to verify that they are either a U.S. citizen, a legal permanent resident, or a foreigner with work authorization and provide documents to prove the claim. Those forms, Arthur wrote, “go into the business’s file cabinet until the government asks to see them as part of a drawn-out ‘worksite enforcement’ process.”

That process, however, has been largely underutilized in recent decades. During the process, HSI reviews provided I-9s and supporting documentation, comparing identification documents to federal databases to determine their veracity. If HIS notices significant discrepancies or has reason to believe that documents provided may be falsified or fraudulent, the agency will serve the employer with either a “Notice of Discrepancies” (NOD) or a “Notice of Suspect Documents” (NOSD). A NOD allows an employer a little over a week to either fire the troublesome employee or have the employee provide documentation sufficient to rectify the discrepancies, while a NOSD is an explicit warning that HIS has either found enough cause to believe that an employee’s documents are fraudulent or has ascertained that the employee is unauthorized to work in the U.S. In those cases, HIS can conduct interviews and raids at workplaces after obtaining a “Warrant for Entry.”

In 1984, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the precursor to today’s ICE, conducted the majority of its arrests via workplace enforcement operations, arresting roughly 500 illegal immigrants per year. “If immigration arrests were occurring at the same pace today, ICE would be making more than three million arrests per annum, roughly 7.5 times as many as in the first year of Trump II,” Arthur noted. “Jobs are the magnet drawing aliens to the United States illegally, and illegal aliens are most likely to be found — and most heavily concentrated — in workplaces run by businesses willing to look the other way during the hiring process,” he continued. “Street and prison arrests of criminal aliens and those under final orders are appropriate (and usually mandated), but to make a big dent in the illegal population ICE should engage in … ‘briefcase immigration enforcement’ and start investigating the employers.”

Oversight Project President Mike Howell, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, also advised worksite enforcement as a critical tool to be engaged by the Trump administration, noting the use President Dwight D. Eisenhower made of worksite enforcement during his 1954 “Operation Wetback” deportation program, which saw over one million illegal immigrants removed from the U.S. interior. “The Eisenhower program was fairly blunt in how it went about enforcement, using a ‘system of blocking off an area and mopping it up.’ This is what would be known today as large-scale work-site enforcement,” Howell wrote. “Yet, the Trump Administration has focused on criminal illegal alien enforcement as a priority as opposed to sustained large-scale worksite enforcement,” he continued. “Proponents of immigration enforcement have long recognized the importance of worksite enforcement,” but DHS has focused much of its effort on targeting illegal immigrants who either had prior criminal convictions when they entered the U.S. or have committed violent crimes since illegally entering the country. “The first Trump Administration generally withdrew formal policies that limited enforcement but continued operational focus on criminal populations,” Howell noted. “Worksite enforcement during President Trump’s first term was nearly unheard of.”

In order to deliver on the promise of more deportations, Howell suggested that the Trump administration shift its focus from “law enforcement” (i.e. tracking down and arresting illegal immigrants convicted of or charged with violent crimes) to broader immigration enforcement, remove language restricting the scope and scale of ICE arrests from budgetary and guiding documents, and “dramatically increase worksite enforcement.” He wrote, “Limiting the scope of immigration enforcement through a prioritization policy will prevent the Trump Administration from even marginally approaching Eisenhower-era levels of deportations. Only through large-scale worksite enforcement and a focus on the quantity of deportations can the numbers begin to materially increase.” Howell pointed out that industries that rely heavily on illegal immigrants as workers (agriculture and hospitality, for example) have aggressively lobbied the president to restrict immigration enforcement to the “worst of the worst” and leave worksite enforcement alone for the present. “Until those artificial limits are stripped away and worksite enforcement is treated as the necessary feature of a mass deportation agenda, the Trump Administration will remain structurally constrained from replicating the operational scale of Eisenhower’s 1954 effort.”

Last week, the Mass Deportation Coalition published a “playbook” featuring policy suggestions for the Trump administration to utilize to effect a “mass deportation” program and expel millions — not just tens or hundreds of thousands — of illegal immigrants from the U.S. interior. Like Howell, the Mass Deportation Coalition (which counts the Heritage Foundation, Oversight Project, Center for Baptist Leadership, State Leadership Initiative, former ICE chief Mark Morgan, and others as partners) recommended shifting from prioritizing the arrest and removal of the “worst of the worst” to more general immigration enforcement efforts. The “worst of the worst approach,” the organization noted, is “rooted in the Clinton Administration and morphed from the exception into the rule during the Obama and Biden Administrations” and is “unwarranted in the Trump Administration, as it creates an operational cap on enforcement results.”

The Mass Deportation Coalition also urged the use of worksite enforcement operations. “Worksite enforcement is the most critical missing enforcement policy for the Trump Administration to get on track and meet his agenda,” the playbook affirmed. “There is no chance for a mass deportation program if worksite enforcement is not the centerpiece. Enforcement at scale means focusing on physical areas where illegal aliens are concentrated: worksites. This is how President Eisenhower, who President Trump pledged to surpass in terms of enforcement efforts, was able to achieve his success.”

According to the playbook, anywhere from 10.8 million to as many as 12 million illegal immigrants are currently working in the U.S. In order to maximize the effect of worksite enforcement operations, the Mass Deportation Coalition recommended that DHS broker agreements with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) to “identify the businesses where aliens are working unlawfully and target them there.”

“Deploying federal resources for worksite enforcement would accomplish multiple goals at the same time. First, since the vast majority of illegal aliens are economic migrants, worksite enforcement would significantly disincentivize the main driver and motivation for illegal immigration into the United States in the first place — economic opportunity for illegal aliens,” the playbook suggested. “Fewer illegal aliens will try to come to the United States and those here will be incentivized to leave if their economic opportunities are foreclosed through increased worksite enforcement,” it continued. “Second, if accompanied by a robust employer sanctions program, it would send a message to employers that employ illegal labor that there are real and significant consequences for violating the law and many will stop doing so in order to avoid fines and other penalties.”

Another suggestion in the playbooks is to move the Form I-9 process online in order to mitigate and more easily detect and identify fraud. “Given the millions of illegal aliens working in the United States, few would contend the current paper-based Form I-9 verification system in any way ‘provides a secure system to determine employment eligibility in the United States,’” as the INA requires. “A system that requires employers to file Forms I-9 online directly with DHS would allow ICE to inspect them ‘at the time of hiring,’ and that system could also require employers to maintain an ‘electronic’ version of the form that the Department of Labor … could request, which would comply with the rest of the record retention requirement.”

The Mass Deportation Coalition urged that worksite enforcement operations are “an operationally low-risk use of resources” since the industries most heavily employing illegal immigrants are easily identifiable, and could easily allow the Trump administration to effect one million deportations over the course of 2026, bolstering Republican voters’ confidence in the president and the party. However, the organization warned, “Worksite enforcement is only effective to the degree that aliens identified and apprehended at worksites are actually removed from the United States. Historically, worksite operations have produced arrests that were not followed by timely deportation, undermining both deterrence and public confidence.”

To ensure that illegal immigrants arrested through worksite enforcement operations are successfully deported, the Mass Deportation Coalition suggested “bypass[ing] the litigation phase entirely” and moving those who have prior removal orders immediately to detention and deportation proceedings, while those without extant orders of removal should be processed through immigration courts on an expedited basis. “The success of this worksite campaign will largely depend on the aggressive prosecution of the employers of illegal aliens.”