Professor Johnson in The Conversation: Trump's Tactics are Extraordinary, Deportation Numbers are Not

In a July 25 piece in the Conversation,  Professor Kevin R. Johnson writes that it is far from clear that President Donald Trump’s current deportation tactics will result in fewer undocumented immigrants in the United States.

As Johnson writes, all modern U.S. presidents, including Trump in his first administration, “have attempted to reduce the population of millions of undocumented immigrants. But their various strategies have not had significant results, with the population hovering around 11 million from 2005 to 2022.”

Although Trump’s unprecedented executive orders and other tactics have caused fear and damage that will linger in immigrant communities, there are no indicators yet that numbers of undocumented immigrants will fall significantly in his second term.

Johnson points out that although U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested approximately 30,000 people in June – the highest monthly figure in at least five years – deportations of non-citizens lagged behind those during the Obama administration’s record-setting year of 2013 in which more than 400,000 noncitizens were deported.

“The gap between arrests and deportations shows the challenges the Trump administration faces in making good on his promised mass deportation campaign,” Johnson writes.

Kevin R. Johnson is a distinguished professor of law, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law, and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law. Johnson also has an appointment as professor of Chicana/o studies at UC Davis. He served as dean of UC Davis Law from 2008 to 2024. Johnson is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of immigration law and policy, refugee law, and civil rights.