Trump’s impact on International Migrants Day: ‘It has been one of the most difficult years, the cruelest’

Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, from the pro-immigrant American Friends Service Committee in Florida, cherishes a memory that could be used to encapsulate 2025. It is the memory of a family who were given a choice as to their fate at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Miramar, Miami. The couple had arrived early for the woman’s appointment with the authorities. She went inside, while her husband remained outside, but an unexpected message informed him that he, too, had to enter the building. At that moment, the officers told them that one of them was going to be deported, but that the couple had to choose who it would be. She said she would leave because he was the one who worked and supported the household. He said no, she should stay with their two children. In the end, it was the mother who remained in the United States.

“I was shocked,” says Mendez-Zamora, who accompanied the family. “It has been one of the most difficult years, the cruelest, where we have seen the most human rights violations,” the activist asserts outside the Miramar facility, where a group of volunteers, organizations, religious leaders, and relatives of people detained by ICE gathered to protest on the eve of International Migrants Day, commemorated on December 18.

The closing year, 2025, is likely to be remembered as the most terrifying on record for the immigrant population in the United States, with more than 65,000 people in detention, 605,000 deportations, and 1.9 million self-deportations, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “The Trump administration is breaking historic records,” said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin last week. “Illegal aliens are hearing our message to leave now. They know that if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return,” she added.

Like a horror film, images of the immigration offensive launched by the White House have unfolded over the past few months: families being forcibly separated by masked agents; children afraid to go to school and parents in hiding; deportations to third countries, some as far away as South Sudan or Eswatini; mass raids in different cities across the country; arrests inside courthouses; hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their legal status...

“It’s been an exhausting, frustrating year. What’s been happening has been terrifying,” says María Asunción Bilbao, campaign coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee in Florida, who goes to the ICE offices in Miramar every week to accompany migrant families to their appointments with the authorities. “Tomorrow, International Migrants Day, will be a sad day in this country because they aren’t respecting the rights of any refugee, but I admire the bravery of the migrants; it takes courage to leave everything behind and come to a new country.”

What is happening today in the United States is a reality that will not surprise those who listened attentively to Trump throughout his campaign, built on the rhetoric of guaranteeing “national security” through the expulsion of all “criminals.” Trump has gone all out to fulfill what he promised before the elections that returned him to power in November 2024: to carry out “the largest deportation in history.”

ICE arrests on the rise

In an effort to professionalize the expulsion of migrants, Trump deployed not only his rhetoric but also a vast economic arsenal to ensure the detention, imprisonment, and deportation of people. For this purpose, he had an agency he would strengthen until it became the greatest source of fear: ICE.

Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s anti-immigrant policy, observed that arrests were progressing slowly during the first few months of the campaign, making it necessary to increase the number of arrests to 3,000 per day if the promised quota was to be met. While federal authorities had arrested around 18,000 people per month by April, by November the number of arrests stood at 21,127, a figure that was still below the government’s targets.

To strengthen, among other things, the ICE machinery, Trump signed his tax reform bill, the so-called “big, beautiful bill,” into law in July. The agency thus became the best-funded in U.S. history, with a budget of over $100 billion, up from approximately $8 billion. Some $45 billion would be allocated to the construction of new detention centers and about $14 billion to deportation operations. An additional $30 billion would be used to recruit more agents, bringing the total number of personnel dedicated to pursuing migrants to 100,000.

The result has been visible: large-scale immigration raids in major, primarily Democratic, cities, which in the past had served as sanctuaries. Agents have arrived in Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Charlotte, North Carolina, despite objections from local authorities. They are also present at courthouses across the country, waiting for migrants to finish their hearings so they can handcuff them.

Increase in deportation flights

Other tools have also served to grease the wheels of the government’s anti-immigrant machinery in recent months: the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for multiple nationalities and hundreds of thousands of people; the elimination of the parole program, which left more than half a million beneficiaries in limbo; the travel ban signed in June to halt legal migration from several countries, expanded to 39 nations this week; thousands of 287(g) agreements, which allow local police to work hand-in-hand with ICE; and the signing of pacts with third countries that receive deported migrants. According to Human Rights First’s ICE flight monitor, deportation flights during the second Trump administration have exceeded 1,900, a 41% increase compared to the same period in 2014.

The president has also not hesitated to push the boundaries of the law to achieve his goals, defying courts that attempt to block his actions. Invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, the Republican administration sent more than 200 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador, despite a judge’s injunction. Other migrants have been sent to offshore detention centers, such as the Guantanamo Naval Base. The number of people released on bail, parole, or supervised release has also decreased, falling to 3% in September.

In addition to all this, the president suspended not only asylum and residency processes, but also halted procedures such as citizenship applications, thus undermining the highest status a migrant can achieve in the country. Recently, Trump was asked if he planned to denaturalize migrants who had obtained citizenship. “If I have the power to do it — I’m not sure that I do, but if I do — I would denaturalize, absolutely,” he replied. This Tuesday, it was revealed that his administration will seek to denaturalize between 100 and 200 people per month from now on. If successful, this would represent a massive increase in denaturalization proceedings: from 2017 to the present, there have only been 120 cases.

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