Immigration Enforcement Under Trump Intensifies, Diverging from Obama’s Approach

President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have grown increasingly unpopular, with two-thirds of Americans saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations have gone too far, according to a recent Marist Poll. Meanwhile, social media debates have intensified, with many users claiming former President Barack Obama employed equally harsh enforcement measures.

A fact-check investigation by DW examined these claims by analyzing detention deaths, deportation figures, and enforcement priorities to determine whether the two administrations’ approaches are truly comparable.

Data shows deaths in ICE custody have accelerated under Trump’s administration. While 67 detainees died during Obama’s eight-year presidency, Trump’s administration has already recorded 83 deaths. The first year of Trump’s second term alone saw 37 deaths—comparable to the number accumulated under Obama over four years.

“The Trump administration is currently on track to see the largest number of deaths by people who are detained by ICE,” said immigration law scholar Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, attributing this trend to more people being detained for longer periods.

Deportation statistics require careful analysis. While Obama’s administration deported approximately 3.1 million people across two terms, peaking at 407,000 in 2012, Trump’s first term saw 932,000 deportations, with an estimated additional 300,000 in his second term so far.

However, these raw numbers mask critical differences in enforcement priorities and methods. David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project, explained: “A lot of the confusion comes from lumping together deportations that start with an arrest at the border and deportations that start within the United States.”

When examining interior deportations—those targeting people already living in the United States rather than those apprehended at the border—the comparison shifts dramatically. Interior deportations quadrupled in late 2025 compared to the final year of the Biden administration.

“At least by the second half of 2025, the Trump administration was deporting more people from the interior than any administration in this century,” Hausman noted.

The Obama and Trump administrations also differed significantly in their enforcement targets. Most of Obama’s interior deportations involved transfers from jails or prisons—focusing on individuals with criminal convictions, though his administration used a broad definition that included minor traffic infractions.

In contrast, Trump’s ICE has increasingly targeted people without criminal convictions through “street arrests,” actively pursuing undocumented immigrants in communities rather than jails. His administration has also revoked protected status for populations from countries including Somalia, Haiti, and Venezuela.

Another factor contributing to Trump’s lower overall deportation numbers is the significant decline in border crossings, which hit a 50-year low in 2025. This drop began during the Biden administration, stemming from diplomatic agreements with Mexico and Central American countries.

Hiroshi Motomura, co-director of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy and former Obama advisor, emphasized fundamental differences between the two approaches: “I think of them as fundamentally different.”

Obama combined strict border enforcement with more lenient policies toward immigrants already living within the country, famously saying he wanted to target “felons, not families” and “criminals, not children.” His administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, protecting children of undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Trump, meanwhile, has made legal immigration more difficult by increasing fees, slowing processing times, and intensifying security checks. “In contrast to every US president for a hundred years, the Trump administration has been skeptical or even hostile to what we would call legal migration,” Motomura explained.

The current administration has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement, multiplying the budget, increasing detention capacity, establishing third-country deportation agreements, and replacing career immigration judges with what critics call “deportation judges.”

Trump’s approach also includes deploying federal agents into cities, normalizing courthouse arrests, and employing rhetoric such as “invasion” and “emergency”—representing a significant departure from previous administrations’ approaches to immigration enforcement.