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With President Donald Trump’s second term about to cross the 100-day mark, the White House is pointing to precipitous drops in illegal border crossings and a spate of interior enforcement actions as evidence that Trump is keeping his promise to crack down on illegal immigration and reverse his predecessor’s policies while re-instituting harsh measures to deter asylum seekers and other refugees.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and White House “border czar” Tom Homan used an early morning briefing with reporters to take a victory lap over what Leavitt called “extraordinary” results in deterring migrants from crossing into the United States or remaining there using harsh and legally creative methods that are testing the bounds of presidential authority.
Leavitt declared that the country’s borders “are now secure because of President Trump,” who she credited with having “restored the rule of law, enforced our immigration laws and defended America's sovereignty” by way of declaring a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border at the outset of his second term and making use of the American military to take control of land along the border. She also blamed Trump’s predecessor, former president Joe Biden, for what she described as “weakness in open border policies” that had “allowed vicious cartels to functionally control through a campaign of terror, rape and brutal force, nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border.”
Trump, she said, “put a stop” to the Biden policies “in record time” by ordering the State Department to designate drug cartels and two Latin American gangs — the Salvadoran gang known as Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 and the Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua — as foreign terrorist organizations, and by invoking a 1798 law purporting to allow federal authorities to seize and summarily deport any Salvadoran or Venezuelan national deemed to be a member of either group.
“The Trump administration is working 24/7 to successfully arrest and deport these illegal criminals and foreign terrorists from our communities. We are in the beginning stages of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history,” she said.
Homan, a former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during the first Trump term whose White House title is Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, followed Leavitt to the White House lectern and slammed Biden as “he first president in the history of this nation who came in office and unsecured a border on purpose.”
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