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The government of Donald Trump is recalibrating its strategy for mass deportations: it is abandoning the aggressive and high-visibility tactics that characterized the early months of its second term and adopting a more discreet approach, although it does not relinquish its ambitious goals, according to a report by AP.
The style change became evident with the arrival of the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, who took office on March 24 in place of Kristi Noem.
While Noem made her first official trip to New York to participate in arrests alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Mullin traveled to North Carolina to oversee recovery efforts following a hurricane.
This transformation is partly a response to the declining popularity of more confrontational tactics, which included clashes with protesters and the shooting deaths of two American citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.
"We continue to enforce immigration laws. We are still deporting undocumented individuals who should not be here. We continue to go after the worst of the worst, but we are doing it in a more discreet manner," Mullin stated on April 16 in an interview with CNBC.
Despite the change in tactics, the numbers tell a different story: ICE states in budget documents that it plans to expel 1 million people during this fiscal year and the next, compared to approximately 442,000 expulsions the previous year.
Detentions under ICE custody have decreased from a peak of approximately 72,000 in January to 58,000 this week, but the government has already acquired 11 warehouses across the country to expand its capacity and aims to reach 100,000 detention spaces during the current fiscal year.
"They are working to build, really, a colossal system," warned Doris Meissner, a senior researcher at the Migration Policy Institute and former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Congress allocated more than $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for the immigration agenda, and approved DHS funding on May 1, after the agency had been without funds for 75 days.
Another key element of the new strategy is the expansion of the 287(g) agreements, which empower local and state law enforcement to carry out immigration enforcement tasks: they increased from 135 in 20 states before Trump took office to more than 1,400 in 41 states and territories today.
In parallel, the government is moving forward with the elimination of temporary legal protections to broaden the pool of deportable individuals without the need for public raids. The number of residency cards approved by the Citizenship and Immigration Service halved within a year, according to the Cato Institute.
In the case of Cubans, ICE detentions increased by 463% between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025, and at least four direct deportation flights to Havana have been completed in 2026 so far, with 530 repatriated.
From conservative sectors, the pressure to intensify the numbers does not relent.
“The deportation figures are simply too low; they need to be much higher, and they possibly will be,” insisted Mike Howell from the Coalition for Mass Deportation, which is pushing to reach one million annually.
A determining factor in the coming months will be the Supreme Court's decision on the revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, a case that could affect over 1.3 million people in 17 countries, and which the conservative majority of the court appeared to lean in favor of the government during the arguments on April 30.
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