Makeshift beds line an outdoor tent at the Casa Del Migrante, the largest shelter in Piedras Negras, Mexico, in February. Photo / Anna Watts, for the Washington Post
When United States President Donald Trump pledged to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” the border city of Tijuana swung into action.
The local government declared a state of emergency. Federal authorities built a shelter for up to 2600 deportees, complete with beds, showers, and white-coated chefs.
It was, one local official said, the “zombie apocalypse scenario”.
But five months after Trump took office, the shelter is nearly empty. So few deportees have arrived - an average of 38 a day - that one of the two floors has been mothballed.
The situation is similar in other Mexican border communities.
While the Trump Administration’s aggressive immigration arrests have sparked protests in Los Angeles and other US cities, some of the migrants’ home countries have been surprised how few have been sent back.
“The reality is, up until now, there haven’t been mass deportations,” said Mónica Vega, the Baja California state official in charge of the Tijuana reception centre.
The empty shelters represent a little-noticed irony in Trump’s campaign against illegal immigration.
He has largely shut down the northbound flow of migrants through Mexico by ending US asylum programmes that had attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners. As a further deterrent, he has sharply boosted troop levels along the border.
Those moves have dried up the pool of recently arrived, easy-to-deport migrants.
For Trump to meet his goal of deporting one million migrants in his first year, he is turning to the more complex search for people who have lived in the US without permission for years.
It’s hard to get precise information on how many people have been removed so far by the Trump Administration.
The Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office has stopped publishing monthly data on immigration enforcement. DHS did not respond to a question on why it’s no longer available.
Spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the Washington Post that more than 239,000 migrants had been deported since Trump took office.
She did not respond to a query on whether that included people detained by both the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If it does - as analysts said was likely - it would be significantly fewer than the 341,060 repatriated from February into June last year under President Joe Biden.
McLaughlin noted the Administration has intensified its raids in American communities.
“ICE made more at-large arrests in the first few weeks of President Trump’s presidency than the entire last year under the previous administration,” she said.
More than 56,300 migrants are in custody, the most in years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Deportations appear to be rising.
Many of those immigrants are entitled to court hearings before being removed from the country, which could delay their departure.
In addition to the logistical challenges of deporting them, the Administration is facing a backlash from communities and industries in which migrants live and work.
“Trump has already achieved his objective of closing the border,” said Tonatiuh Guillén, a former director of Mexico’s immigration agency. Conducting large-scale deportations from the US interior, however, is a different story.
“The resistance of communities, the opposition to government policies and the resistance of all kinds of associations - churches, lawyers’ offices - will act as a brake.”
In the weeks before Trump took office, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Government worked feverishly to build 10 shelters along the border, with a total capacity of 25,000 deportees.
The logic was clear. At 5.5 million, Mexicans make up the largest share of migrants living without authorisation in the US, according to the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
“We really thought we would be inundated,” said the Rev Patrick Murphy, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa del Migrante, a non-governmental shelter here.
In Tijuana, the federal Government needed a big site, fast. It rented Flamingos, a party venue overlooking a busy highway, normally used for wedding and quinceanera celebrations. In other border cities, the military erected giant white tents to serve as shelters.
Trump launched his deportation campaign with a stunning series of actions.
He ordered the construction of a 30,000-bed detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. He sent more than 200 Venezuelans to a harsh anti-terrorism prison in El Salvador. By late April, the Administration claimed: “Skyrocketing Arrests and Deportations”.
But illegal border crossings quickly plunged, reducing the number of people who could be returned relatively quickly and easily.
In the first five months of 2025, Border Patrol agents apprehended just 32,776 Mexicans at the border - an 86% drop from the same period a year earlier.
“Border encounters are down to the lowest in American history,” said McLaughlin. She acknowledged: “Such miniscule encounters mean low number of returns”.
In Latin America, some countries were startled to realise they were receiving fewer deportees from the US, not more.
The number arriving in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia in the first five months of this year dropped more than 30% from the same period in 2024, according to data from their migration agencies.
Historically, those nations’ information hasn’t necessarily been comparable with US data. DHS figures include a broader range of deportees than some countries do - for example, foreigners returned without an immigration hearing. Still, in some major migrant-sending countries, the trend of declining numbers of deportees was clear.
That wasn’t true everywhere: Venezuela, whose authoritarian government had accepted very few US deportation flights, reversed course under pressure from Trump.
It’s now receiving around two flights per week, according to Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportations by ICE for the immigrant advocacy group Witness at the Border.
In Tijuana, Trump’s border policies have transformed the landscape. In recent years, shelters run by charities were packed, sometimes leaving migrants to sleep on the ground outside. Now, many of the facilities are nearly vacant.
“There’s no legal way to ask for asylum,” Murphy said. “When people understand that they don’t come.”
In a further shift, the US Government is increasing the percentage of Mexicans it deports directly to the south of the country, by plane.
Towards the end of his administration, Biden intensified deportations. But he spared most undocumented immigrants from the interior of the country and said Congress should allow many to become citizens.
The Trump Administration is now focusing on removing such residents. “We are putting the American people first by removing illegal aliens who pose a threat to our communities,” McLaughlin said.
Andrew Selee, director of the Migration Policy Institute, cautioned that deporting such people is “a complicated process”.
“The big numbers have always been people captured at the border,” he said.
Deportations are now starting to accelerate
Danilo Rivera, head of Guatemala’s migration agency, says the number of deportees is picking up. More than 3600 landed in May, a 44% increase from a month earlier. Guatemala’s Government agreed in a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to receive more planes carrying deportees, Rivera noted.
“Instead of five or six per week, we now have 14,” he said in an interview.
US deportation flights around the globe rose from 125 in April to 190 in May, the highest monthly total since September 2021, Cartwright said.
Trump’s giant tax and immigration bill will likely mean a far bigger jump in removals.
Until now, the deportation operation has been constrained by the number of immigration agents, detention facilities and planes available.
The legislation signed by Trump on Saturday would fund thousands of additional immigration law enforcement agents and could more than double the number of detention beds to 100,000.
“I wouldn’t encourage at all the Sheinbaum Government to take down those tents” on the border, said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group.
“They’re going to need them before the year is out.”
Even with more resources, however, US agents will likely run into obstacles detaining immigrants who have become a structural part of the workforce for farms, restaurants and hotels.
Those industries have lobbied aggressively for an exemption from the raids. They won a reprieve from Trump last month, but it was quickly reversed.
The men arriving in recent days at the government shelter in Tijuana exemplified the complexity of such deportations.
One, Carlos Tafolla, 31, who picked grapes in California’s Sonoma County, said he worked in the US for 13 years and had three children who lived there with their mother, an American citizen.
Another man, who identified himself only as José, a 45-year-old construction worker, said he had three children under the age of 12 in San Diego.
He’d been away from Mexico for 20 years. Asked what he intended to do next, he looked out at the busy highway, still stunned. “I don’t know. I have no plans.”
- Samantha Schmidt in Bogotá, Colombia, Valentina Muñoz Castillo and Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City, Claudia Mendez in Guatemala City, Ernesto Eslava in Tijuana and Emmanuel Martinez in Washington contributed to this report.