WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday directing the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to identify within a month the cities and states that are not complying with federal immigration laws, a White House official said Monday.
Last week, a federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from withholding federal funding from more than a dozen so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown.
Trump launched an aggressive enforcement campaign after taking office, surging troops to the southern border and pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The Republican president said the actions were needed after years of high illegal immigration under his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.
At a press briefing, White House officials touted a steep decline in illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border during Trump’s first three months in office.
U.S. Border Patrol arrested 7,200 migrants illegally crossing the border in March, the lowest monthly total since 2000 and down from a peak of 250,000 in December 2023.
“We have the most secure border in the history of this nation and the numbers prove it,” Trump border czar Tom Homan said at the briefing.
In his first hundred days in office, Trump has moved to strip legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of people, increasing the pool of those who can potentially be deported.
While arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally have spiked, deportations remain below last year’s levels under Biden when there were more people illegally crossing the border who could be quickly returned.