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Throughout last year, Donald Trump delivered on his signature campaign promise of mass deportation in draconian and theatrical style. Hardline figures such as Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and Gregory Bovino, the border patrol commander, became the face of Trump’s crackdown, defending a strategy of large-scale raids that sent immigration agents flooding into US cities, terrorizing communities and clashing with protesters.

Then in January, immigration officers killed two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, in a matter of three weeks. The killings spurred a sweeping backlash that has led Democratic members of Congress to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for more than a month in an attempt to rein in ICE. Even Trump said “maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch”.

Since then, Trump’s mass deportation campaign has taken on a new public face as its glaring unpopularity has become clear and polls show growing discontent with the president’s strategy.

The White House demoted Bovino, who is retiring this week. Out as well is Noem, who relentlessly championed ICE’s crackdown in the media. In their places, Trump has installed Tom Homan, the border czar, and Markwayne Mullin, the incoming DHS secretary.

The goal of mass deportation isn’t over: both Homan and Mullin are immigration hardliners and Trump loyalists, and arrests have continued. But there’s been a shift in tone: Homan quickly met with Minneapolis elected officials to ease tensions, then backed off the Bovino-era strategy of swarming blue cities with ICE officers. Mullin told senators at his confirmation hearing he would once again require immigration officers to obtain a judicial warrant to enter a home, and that he was willing to work with sanctuary cities.

ICE has largely shifted away from the surges that drove constant confrontation between deportation officers and protesters.

“Leadership sets the cultural tone of the agency,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at the Ohio State University college of law in Columbus. “When we see bombastic rhetoric from the secretary of homeland security or a border patrol official like Gregory Bovino, who is promoted to a fairly high-ranking position for six months or so, that sets the tone for the operations that we see lower-level field officers carrying out.”

“At the same time,” García added, “the demotion of Gregory Bovino also sends a message to those officers.”

The data appears to show that immigration arrests have slightly dropped as the Trump administration recalibrates its strategy. Average daily immigration arrests fell 11% to 1,115 in February after peaking at about 1,300 two months prior, according to internal data obtained by the New York Times.

That pace is unlikely to please the most hawkish voices in the White House such as Stephen Miller, a Trump aide, who pressed homeland security to hit 3,000 arrests per day last year.

But the pace of ICE’s work is still unprecedented. The daily average arrest rate is still easily high enough for Trump to continue carrying out what is on track to become the largest immigration crackdown since the creation of homeland security in 2003. Daily immigration arrests still stand roughly four times as high as they did in Joe Biden’s last year in office, the Times data shows. ICE has more than doubled the number of its officers since 2024.

“The enforcement operation and the goals of the administration are the same, but the way they’re being carried out is less overt,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

ICE has historically relied on teaming up with local law enforcement agencies to transfer unauthorized immigrants from jails as the most efficient way to boost deportations. Targeting cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis with confrontational sweeps instead created novel legal challenges and political backlash. Their main effect, Putzel-Kavanaugh said, was to create a climate of fear designed to encourage undocumented immigrants to “self-deport”.

“They’re flashy, they yield a high number of news stories, but they also play to the larger goal of the administration letting communities know that immigration enforcement is a top priority,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said.

It’s not clear that the chaotic strategy embraced by Noem and Bovino significantly increased removals, compared with ICE’s traditional strategy of relying on jail transfers and targeted arrests of people with final orders of removal or criminal convictions. The Trump administration’s surge of immigration officers to Minneapolis routinely resulted in arrests of people that ICE later had to release, according to Georgette Ros-Kopel, a local immigration attorney – including US citizens, green card holders and people with pending asylum claims or family sponsors.

“They make people scared and they make people suffer and they make people have to pay for a lawyer to fix everything,” Ros-Kopel said. “But they weren’t necessarily leading to more deportations.”

ICE also has a huge infusion of cash to expand detention from the “big, beautiful” spending bill that Congress passed last year. And the plummeting number of arrests at the border following Trump’s crackdown on humanitarian claims allows ICE to devote more of its resources to interior enforcement.

Since Trump retook office, ICE has not released data documenting the number of people deported from within the country’s borders, as the agency historically has around the end of the calendar year. (ICE has not responded to several requests for updated interior removal figures.) But an analysis by the New York Times places the number of immigrants removed by ICE from within the US at 230,000 – the highest number of interior removals since 2009.

The biggest bottleneck that the Trump administration will face in its attempt to keep ratcheting up interior deportations is a lack of immigration judges to deal with the backlog of nearly 4m cases.

But the White House doesn’t seem interested, said Linus Chan, a law professor who directs the Detainee Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School. The Trump administration fired 100 immigration judges last year, then brought in military lawyers to temporarily fill gaps.

Instead, Chan said, the Trump administration appears poised to use the looming threat of its growing detention capacity to intimidate more people into “self-deporting”.

“They look at the 4m case backlog, and they don’t care,” Chan said. “They recognize they have the ability to detain, and they’ll use that to kick everybody out.”