Depending on who you ask, some will say Trump has already done it, while others will argue he has yet to achieve it and could fail.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared in mid-August that “in less than 200 days, 1.6 MILLION illegal immigrants have left the United States population” as a result of illegal immigrants choosing to self-deport rather than be forcibly deported by federal immigration officers.

DC police chief allows officers to work with ICE to arrest illegal immigrants

But data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency tasked with arresting, detaining, and removing illegal immigrants, suggested that in the first six months of the Trump administration, ICE deported about 150,000 illegal immigrants, far below the goal of a million.

When asked on Thursday if ICE is still focused on reaching a million deportations in the first year, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said the focus was targeting criminals.

“I think what the key is, obviously, we always say from the get-go is the worst-of-the-worst, right? You want to focus on, we want to focus on with our federal partners is those criminal elements in the neighborhood, so at my level, that’s what I have to be focused on,” Lyons told a select group of reporters whom he led on a tour through ICE’s training headquarters in Glynco on Thursday.

An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute touted that even as arrests have climbed since Trump took office, the “current pace of deportations suggests the administration will fall well short of its stated goal of one million deportations annually.”

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., anticipated about 538,000 deportations by the end of the year.

With tens of billions of dollars and plans to double the current size of ICE personnel, the agency is about to ramp up arrests and make Trump’s goal a reality.

‘One big, beautiful bill’ delivers resources

In order to ramp up deportations and hit a million, ICE must arrest more people and get them through court proceedings faster. To arrest more people, ICE first needs substantially more detention space to hold illegal immigrants as they go through court, as well as more officers to track down more people and take them into custody.

Earlier this summer, Congress passed and Trump signed into law the “one big, beautiful bill.” The massive bill contained $65 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, including $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE officers.

“The Big Beautiful Bill will allow ICE to hire 10,000 new officers. ICE currently has 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel in more than 400 offices. A larger force will provide ICE agents with the necessary protection so they can continue to carry out removals,” Noem told the Washington Examiner.

ICE is offering $50,000 sign-on bonuses, up to $60,000 in student loan repayment, and other generous benefits to new recruits that it is attempting to reach in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign launched this summer. It has removed the age cap to allow for more applications and even marketed it as the ideal father-son bonding situation for families.

In less than a month, ICE has received 110,000 applications.

Simultaneously, ICE has convinced states to turn five facilities into federal immigrant detention facilities with the recent debut of “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida’s Everglades, the “Deportation Depot” in Florida, the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana, the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska, and “Lone Star Lockup” in Texas.

The addition of state detention sites temporarily gives ICE more space to detain illegal immigrants as it waits to deport them. At present, ICE has detention space for just over 50,000 people, but the “one big, beautiful bill” has funded 100,000 more beds nationwide, all of which ICE wants to take advantage of.

ICE makes arrests in unusual places

Under the Trump administration, ICE and federal law enforcement have employed unconventional methods for targeting illegal immigrants in an effort to increase arrests, including moving in on men seeking work at home improvement store parking lots. The decision by ICE leaders to target new spots followed White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller‘s lecturing dozens of senior ICE officials in Washington, D.C., which the Washington Examiner was first to report.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said a former ICE official, who spoke with those in the room that day. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’”

In one video from local media outlet KCAL, green-uniformed agents from Border Patrol moved in on day laborers and a woman selling tacos outside a Home Depot in Cypress near Los Angeles. In late July, federal agents were seen detaining two men in a Home Depot parking lot in Encinitas, California, which is north of San Diego.

The LA County jail has begun turning over illegal immigrants in its custody to ICE rather than releasing them into the community, leading ICE to make more arrests within the community. It marked the first time in five years that LA County officials have stepped out of bounds with the sanctuary city policy, which is in place to keep local police from working with federal immigration authorities.

White House border czar Tom Homan has said this type of cooperation is why ICE is heavily present on the streets of many large cities nationwide.

Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Alex Padilla (D-CA) wrote Trump administration officials in July and said targeting people on their way in and out of court suggested that the administration “is not targeting the worst criminals and threats to public safety, instead redirecting staff and resources away from drug trafficking and human trafficking and towards these operations targeting noncriminal immigrants who are following the law and showing up for their day in court.”

Who ICE is arresting

Internal government data shared with the Washington Examiner shows that ICE is still apprehending primarily people with criminal histories.

Between January and mid-July, ICE took 150,000 people into federal custody — 100,000 of whom either had pending criminal charges filed against them or were previously convicted of a crime, according to ICE. About 67% of illegal immigrants arrested had a criminal charge pending or were convicted.

The 67% figure is down slightly from roughly 75% in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

However, Trump’s promise to go after the “worst of the worst” remains far from completion, and his opponents, largely Democrats and immigrant-rights advocates, want to see less focus on noncriminals. Recent arrests indicate the Trump administration is increasingly focused on illegal immigrants, regardless of their criminal background.

Bush-Joseph explained that encouraging ICE officers to go into courts and other places not historically targeted may have led to more arrests of people without criminal records.

“Where they’re arresting people is probably also really impacting these numbers because when you think about who is getting picked up at an ICE check-in or at immigration court, I would think that those would not necessarily be these criminal conviction or pending criminal charge people,” Bush-Joseph said. “On the contrary, they might be people who’ve been here and who were applying for asylum or other relief.”

Some, including the American Immigration Council, have suggested that ICE is going after noncriminals in an effort to dramatically increase the number of arrests and deportations.

“Rather than focus primarily on the border, recent entrants, or even those with criminal records, the Trump administration’s scattershot approach to enforcement is simultaneously targeting longtime residents, those with no criminal records, undocumented families, migrant children, undocumented workers, and random people — including some U.S. citizens with the misfortune to be caught standing near an ICE operation,” AIC wrote in a recent analysis.

Legal challenges 

As ICE has ramped up its very public operations, it has faced increased blowback from the public and in the courts.

In mid-July, Maame E. Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California blocked the Trump administration from racially profiling illegal immigrants in the course of identifying illegal immigrants in public areas of LA County.

Immigrant rights groups, including the National Immigrant Justice Center, Immigration Legal Resource Center, and American Civil Liberties Union, have been among the loudest voices disseminating information about individual rights when approached by federal immigration authorities.

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The Immigration Legal Resource Center provides Spanish and English one-page documents that summarize the best legal tips for dealing with ICE, such as the right to remain silent, to demand a warrant signed by a judge to enter one’s home, and to speak with a lawyer upon arrest.

As a result, illegal immigrants and U.S. citizens have become more informed about how to avoid ICE.