When federal agents fatally shot the US citizen protesters Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January during the nation’s largest immigration-enforcement operation ever, it marked a turning point for the second Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Donald Trump in his second term had sparked outrage and huge protests with federal immigration officers descending en masse on one Democratic-run city after another in what some leaders called militarized “invasions”. Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, then Minneapolis saw lines of masked and armored officers swaggering into town to conduct street arrests, ambushes of day workers waiting in Home Depot car parks for hire, and neighborhood sweeps. Adults and kids were whisked off to detention and protests met with aggressive deployment of chemical spray, teargas, fists and batons. The killings in Minneapolis were the culmination of what appeared to many to be a federal shock force increasingly out of control while being defended by federal leaders – and public opinion broadly turned against this violence.
There was a change of personnel and the administration flagged a switch to a “quieter” approach to immigration enforcement. But while large-scale theatrics on the streets waned, less visible enforcement is no less aggressive on the ground today and continues to ramp up in multiple ways. Here’s a timeline of how the administration’s anti-immigration campaign has evolved in recent months as Trump races to remove millions of people from the US.
2026
26 January
Minneapolis madness leads to a changing of the guard
Two days after Pretti was killed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and 19 days after Good had been shot dead by an ICE agent, the US president announces that his “border czar”, Tom Homan, an immigration-enforcement veteran, will deploy to Minnesota, while Gregory Bovino, the border patrol’s confrontational commander-at-large, suddenly stands aside. Bovino was the face and voice on the street of federal aggression; Good, Pretti and ICE watchers were the symbols of the resistance; and Liam Ramos was the image of collateral harm.
5 March
Secretary of homeland security fired
Kristi Noem becomes the first cabinet secretary fired during the second Trump administration when she loses her leading role at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Noem was tainted with scandals over her close relationship with senior adviser Cory Lewandowski and a $220m advertising campaign starring herself and using a firm with connections to her former staffer. She had also repeated a false narrative that Pretti “brandished” a gun at federal agents and called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Weeks later, Bovino retires and tells the New York Times: “I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens.”
24 March
New face, new approach
Markwayne Mullin, formerly a first-term senator from Oklahoma with “mixed martial arts fighter” on his résumé, is confirmed by the US Senate as the new DHS secretary. At his confirmation hearing, he says about immigration-enforcement officials: “My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
Spring
Empowering local police on the streets
The DHS, in its own words, has “supercharged” efforts to work with local and state law enforcement via so-called 287(g) agreements. From January 2025 these deals mushroomed nationwide, from 142 to 2,315, with most modeled as a “taskforce”. They deputize local and state officials to actively enforce immigration laws during regular police work – normally under federal jurisdiction. By spring, this collaboration acts as a force multiplier for arrests, while allowing federal agents to avoid the spotlight as local cops take on more frontline duties. It also makes immigration enforcement harder to spot for protesters.
May
Pressure from the courts
Attorneys and researchers start noticing immigration court dates being scheduled for unusually large groups of people with little to no notice, in what they say is a tactic to increase the number of deportation orders without ever giving someone an individualized hearing. These mass court dates balloon in June, affecting many thousands of people. Many more applicants struggle to find attorneys and prepare their now-rushed cases. Children are a particular target, too, being rushed through hearings as due process is undermined.
9 June
Money, money, money
After the longest DHS shutdown ever, congressional Republicans use a partisan process to provide the department with an additional $70bn, funding it for the rest of Trump’s second term in a move that critics say undermines accountability. All told, the DHS has received roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars in funding since Trump retook the White House.
25 June
Scotus
The US supreme court rules in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who were legally in the US and protected from deportation. When Trump took office, 17 countries had active TPS designations, which allowed roughly 1.3 million people who were already in the US to live and work legally while it was unsafe for them to return home. But under his second administration, more than a million people who are generally law-abiding and often contribute economically to essential industries with significant labor shortages have already lost their TPS permissions. Now they face imminent risk of deportation to countries as dangerous as Afghanistan, Haiti and South Sudan if they do not qualify or cannot afford to apply for another immigration status. “We’re going after them right now,” Mullin has said of Haitians. “These individuals can either self-deport or we’ll arrest you and send you back. It’s that simple.”
Summer 2026
Airport hazards
ICE significantly increases its collaboration with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to detain immigrants with expired visas – many of whom have pending applications for green cards, asylum, employment-based visas, etc – at airports, sometimes near public spaces such as ticket counters or gates. However, the vast majority of arrests continue to occur where they are far less easy to detect and record on camera, such as in people’s homes and cars.
July 2026
All paying off for ICE
The DHS reports 49,571 immigration arrests, which sets a new monthly record for the second Trump administration, after previously doing so in June. A majority of the people arrested in July have no criminal history. Detentions also increase, with about 66,000 people in custody by the end of the month. Preliminary reports suggest immigration arrests in August have kept pace with July.
13 July
Deadly days
An ICE officer kills Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, in Biddeford, Maine, during a vehicle stop in which Durán was not the intended target, making him the 11th person fatally shot by federal immigration officials both on and off duty during Trump’s second term. The shooting comes days after federal agents similarly killed another immigrant father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston while he was driving his building crew to their job. The DHS briefly pauses most ICE traffic stops until Trump intervenes, posting online: “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” In one 24-hour period, 13 to 14 July, three people die in ICE-involved incidents.
August
Even more local cops do ICE’s bidding
Federal officials reach the milestone of 1,000 new 287(g) agreements since 26 January, expanding collaborations with local law enforcement agencies at an even faster clip than during the second Trump administration’s first year in office.
August
Visa applications
All visas for people applying to immigrate to the US are paused for an unknown amount of time while officials undergo training around the new “public charge” policies.
1 September
Big footprint in the Big Apple
Mullin retroactively announces Operation Rotten Apple, which from 27 July to 29 August quietly rounded up nearly 2,200 immigrants across New York state. The operation is a case study in how aggressive immigration enforcement continues, including in Democratic-led “sanctuary” cities, without the previous theatrics.
Summer into fall
Suffer the children
On August 1 the federal government ends its contract providing more than 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children with legal representation. At the same time, attorneys report that immigration judges are taking a “deport at all costs” approach to their young clients, who suddenly are not receiving the time they need for their pending applications to be adjudicated by other agencies before they are ordered removed from the US. Many of these kids qualify for a green card or other immigration status because they have been abused, abandoned, neglected, trafficked or otherwise severely mistreated, but their applications are often subject to backlogs and quotas that cause delays. In September, the Guardian reveals that Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, has been leading an unprecedented drive across several government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist, and, in some cases, flout federal law.
Taken together, these policy changes are less showy but they have ramped up arrests, detentions and the number of people forced to leave the United States – and put millions more at immediate risk of the same. Many of these people have legal status or ongoing cases for winning or upgrading their legal status, or years of crime-free, honorable life in the US, but are being rounded up, often with little access to due process or attorneys who can help. This latest iteration of Trump’s mass deportation campaign is no longer defined by federal agents patrolling cities with smoke canisters in hand. It’s much more insidious but also more ruthless and effective – and it’s happening everywhere.
