How Trump increased the number of illegal immigrants in America
And made our country poorer in the process
Today’s article is from Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and Daniel Delgado, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump won the support of many voters by pledging to restore order to our immigration system and only go after the “worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has embarked on a sweeping effort to redefine what it means to be lawfully present in the United States by systematically dismantling our nation’s legal immigration system, while simultaneously stripping work authorization from more than a million immigrants who had followed our legal process.
As a result, and despite the very real decline in encounters at the border, there are more people in the United States without lawful status today than before he entered the White House. That’s right, President Trump has actually increased the number of people living in the United States illegally on his watch.
We both served in the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration, where we witnessed firsthand the consequences of a broken and dysfunctional immigration system. But Trump has swung the pendulum in an even worse direction. Our country needs an orderly immigration system that prioritizes American interests. What has happened over the past 18 months has moved us even further away from that goal.
How Trump increased the number of illegal immigrants
The administration has purposefully made it difficult to know what is happening within the immigration system, including by muzzling the independent Office of Homeland Security Statistics. But we know that ICE removed close to 356,000 people in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 from October 1, 2025 through July 11, 2026, or roughly 1,260 people a day. That sounds like a big number, but it is actually roughly on par with President Obama’s high-water mark for removals, 438,000 in FY 2013—and well below the 3,000 removals a day the administration set as an arbitrary goal. Combined with the estimated 234,000 people that ICE removed in the last nine months of FY 2025, ICE has removed close to 590,000 people since Trump’s second inauguration.
Even this larger number, however, is just a fraction of the people that President Trump has, through executive fiat, stripped of lawful status thus far. That’s why the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has increased overall.
In its first year, the Trump administration stripped more than 1.6 million immigrants who were already in the United States of their lawful status and work authorization—a number that has expanded to nearly 2 million immigrants after a recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of Haiti and Syria. That number could reach 2.7 million by the end of the year if DHS cancels other grants of TPS, as expected.
This means that, for every illegal immigrant that President Trump has deported, he has created another three by stripping people who were lawfully present in the United States of their legal status to be here.
The administration has tried to elide this fact by claiming that millions of people have “self- deported,” but the simple fact is that, even using the most generous estimate, economists find that yearly outmigration over the past two years has only increased by 500,000 since President Trump won reelection––another number that looks big until you realize that 2.6 million people left the U.S. in 2024, President Biden’s last year in office.
Flipping the switch from “legal” to “illegal” doesn’t automatically remove someone from the United States, but it does remove them from the formal economy, where they’re able to contribute as established taxpayers under the law and fill critical labor shortages with proper work authorization. Instead, it forces them into a shadow economy to survive—where exploitation is rampant, crimes go unreported, and there’s little accountability for anyone.
The Trump administration’s war on lawful immigration
Trump has also taken direct aim at all forms of legal immigration and travel to the United States, particularly from developing countries in Africa and the Middle East. For example, the administration has banned or partially restricted travel to the United States from 39 countries with predominantly brown or black populations. It also stopped processing visa applications from 75 countries around the globe, including for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens waiting for their Green Cards overseas.
Refugee admissions have been cut from a historic high of 125,000 during the last year of the Biden administration to just 17,500 in FY 2026—an 86% decrease. The primary recipients have been white Afrikaners from South Africa, which tells you exactly the sort of racial and political agenda the Trump administration is advancing.
That hostility has been extended to those residing with lawful status inside the United States, too.
At the beginning of this year, the administration revoked the non-immigrant visas of more than 175,000 people already in the country, such as students and other specialized workers—a 150% increase from 2024. Meanwhile, the administration has systematically narrowed the path by which someone who has gone through the legal process can apply for a Green Card, placing them at higher risk for deportation even though they attempted to follow the law. Even naturalized U.S. citizens aren’t safe: the Trump administration issued a directive identifying denaturalization as one of the Department of Justice’s five main priorities.
When taken together, this is an assault on legal immigration that surpasses what Trump campaigned on.
The public certainly didn’t support the chaos at the border and ensuing disorder in American cities under the Biden administration. But that doesn’t mean they want any of this. A recent survey showed that support for reducing the amount of legal immigration just reached an all-time low, and conversely, support for legal immigration has reached an all-time high.
Trump’s immigration agenda makes us all poorer
What should come as a shock to no one—except maybe the President—is that when you rapidly restrict legal immigration and remove millions of immigrant workers from the U.S. workforce, the economy will suffer.
The Brookings Institution estimates that the shrinking number of arriving immigrants paired with the rising number of deportations decreased consumer spending in 2025 by $40 to $60 billion, and projects it will be further reduced by $10 to $40 billion in 2026.
But the staggering dollar amount is not the only cause for concern. When someone is stripped of their lawful status, their legal authorization to work goes with it. As a result, the labor force is at risk of losing millions of workers, both because of deportations and a reduction in legal workers. This will hit critical industries that are already struggling to find enough employees.
Do you have an elderly relative that needs care? Heading into Trump’s inauguration, severe staffing shortages in the healthcare sector meant that almost half of U.S. nursing homes were limiting new admissions, despite steady increases in the elderly population. These shortages are about to be exacerbated because about 5% of healthcare workers are noncitizens.
Think that housing is unaffordable today? Trump’s actions are making things worse. The National Association of Home Builders reports that severe staffing shortages in skilled building trades mean we are constructing 19,000 fewer new homes each year, costing the economy $10.8 billion annually. It also found that immigrant workers comprise 25.5% of the construction workforce, including one in three tradesmen.
Worried about the rising cost of groceries? Despite campaigning on driving grocery prices down, Trump’s war on legal immigration is causing food prices to go up even further. The lack of immigrant workers means that there are fewer workers to harvest crops, tend to livestock, and support the agricultural industry. This past October, Trump’s own Department of Labor argued in its rulemaking that “The current and imminent labor shortage exacerbated by the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens increased enforcement of existing immigration law, and global competitiveness pressures” justifies a new policy that lowers wages for immigrant workers on H-2A temporary agricultural visas. The DOL also noted that American workers are simply not replacing these jobs, and that “without swift action, agricultural employers will be unable to maintain operations, and the nation’s food supply will be at risk.”
Live in a part of the country that relies on tourism? Before the travel bans were announced in January, government data shows that international arrivals had been slumping throughout the first year of the Trump administration. The travel bans are only going to throw gasoline on this fire, even if the increase in travel resulting from the World Cup may soften the blow a bit in 2026. This decrease matters because economists estimate that travel and tourism account for somewhere between 3% and 9% of our GDP.
Even high-skilled immigration has been swept up in this campaign. According to the Richmond Fed, the administration’s proposal to include a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas will likely make it harder for smaller companies to pay for skilled immigrant labor and may lead U.S. companies to offshore those jobs.
Moving beyond the cycle of dysfunction
Americans are tired of the chaos and dysfunction in our immigration system. They have seen our country careen from the crisis at the border under the Biden administration to ICE’s lawless and indiscriminate actions in the interior under the Trump administration. Predating both leaders is an immigration system filled with temporary programs and loopholes that are fueling this cycle of dysfunction.
Take the Temporary Protected Status program Trump has moved to terminate. It was originally designed by a Republican president to provide temporary legal protection and work authorization for foreign nationals already in the United States, until it was safe to return to their home country. Today, there are 1.3 million people with TPS in the United States, many of whom have been living here for decades and contribute to the economy.
A serious legal immigration system would provide these long-time immigrants a pathway to legal certainty. Instead, presidents of both political parties have used TPS and executive authorities to circumvent a dysfunctional immigration system that Congress refuses to fix, constantly redefining what it means for immigrants to come to the United States the “right way” by the wave of a presidential wand. Now, we have a president who stripped protection from hundreds of thousands of people in order to deport these long-time immigrants—to potentially devastating economic effect, given that TPS holders contribute nearly $36 billion annually to the economy.
This is not a serious way to deal with an issue of such national importance.
Americans deserve a firm but fair immigration system that cracks down on illegal immigration, prevents disorder at the border, and keeps the front door open to the legal immigration we need to continue to grow our economy. We need a system that is fair to the immigrants who play by the rules and contribute to our communities, enhances the prosperity of all Americans, and secures our borders once and for all.
The good news is that this kind of system is not a fantasy—there are a number of proposals (including ours) that would ensure our border remains secure and create a modern, functioning legal immigration system that we can all be proud of. These goals are eminently achievable, if Congress can finally do its job.
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