Thousands Arrested: Trump’s Week 1 Border Crackdown

President Donald Trump is making good on his campaign promise to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and take action to secure the border.  

Deportations

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has specifically focused on arresting criminal illegal aliens and those who pose a threat to the U.S. ICE made more than 3,500 arrests of illegal aliens in the week since Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20.  

In the immediate days after Trump’s inauguration, ICE arrested 538 illegal aliens on Thursday, 593 on Friday, 286 on Saturday, 956 on Sunday, and 1,179 on Monday. ICE has carried out those arrests in a number of U.S. cities, including Sacramento, California; Boston; and Chicago.  

Over the weekend, the Trump administration directed ICE to ramp up daily arrests of criminal illegal aliens to 1,200 to 1,500 daily. 

One of the criminal illegal aliens arrested was Juan Velasquez-Francisco, a Guatemalan national, “convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor,” according to ICE.  

Current arrests are part of ICE’s “targeted enforcement operation,” and are “planned arrests of known criminal aliens who threaten national security or public safety,” according to ICE. While agents are focused on arresting criminals, illegal aliens who are found with those criminal illegal aliens are not excluded from arrest, according to border czar Tom Homan.  

The Trump administration also granted the powers of an immigration officer to additional law enforcement agents to aid ICE in making arrests. Specifically, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service are working with ICE.  

“In one week, law enforcement officials have removed and returned 7,300 illegal aliens,” according to Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

Repatriation flights began Thursday. Mexico was initially reported to be turning away deportation flights, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday that Mexico had accepted four deportation flights. On Friday, multiple military aircraft filled with illegal aliens departed the U.S. for Guatemala. DHS reports that the U.S. has also returned illegal immigrants to Jordan, Brazil, and El Salvador. Colombia was not as quick to agree to receive its criminals back into its country.  

Over the weekend, two U.S. military flights full of Colombian criminal illegal aliens tried to land in Colombia, but the Colombian government would not allow the flights to land.   

Trump subsequently wrote on X that Colombia’s choice to turn those flights away “jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States.”   

As a result, Trump announced new 25% tariffs on all goods coming into the United States from Colombia. He also slapped a travel ban on Colombian government officials and said the U.S. would revoke their visas. After Trump announced those and other sanctions, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, changed his tune.

By Sunday night, Petro agreed that Colombia would accept all U.S. flights of Colombian illegal aliens “without limitation or delay.”  

The White House said that Colombia’s capitulation “[makes] clear to the world that America is respected again,” adding: “President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.”   

Border Security

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring the situation at the border a national emergency. The order allows Trump to surge additional resources and personnel to the border, including military troops.  

The Pentagon announced Wednesday it had begun sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the border.  

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Monday he was sending 400 troops from the Texas Tactical Border Force to work “side-by-side with U.S. Border Patrol agents to stop illegal immigrants from entering our country and to enforce immigration laws.”  

The Texas Tactical Border Force will be joining thousands of Texas National Guard troops that are already at the border. 

Abbott is also sending helicopters and C-130 aircraft to the border to assist the federal government in its border security efforts.  

Newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon will work to carry out the Trump administration’s executive orders aimed at securing the border and removing criminal illegal aliens from the country.  

“[Trump] made it very clear there’s an emergency at the—at the southern border, that the sovereign—the protection of the sovereign territory of the United States is the job of the Defense Department, and the cartels are foreign terrorist organizations,” Hegseth told reporters outside the Pentagon on Monday.  

“As a result, this Pentagon snapped-to last week,” he added. “We helped move forward troops, put in more barriers, and also to ensure mass deportations—support of mass deportations, in support of the president’s objective. That is something the Defense Department absolutely will continue to do.”  

In addition, Trump has ended “catch and release,” reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy, directed border wall construction to begin again, and shut down the CBP One app, which the Biden administration used to mass-parole illegal aliens into the U.S. 

Editor’s Note: This story was updated after publication to include the latest removal and arrest numbers from DHS and ICE, and to include additional nations that have received deportation flights.

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