A year into Trump’s war on immigration, images of an altered America

The absence of migrants is evident in places like this nutrition bar factory, which was raided in September by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in Cato, N.Y., Oct. 22, 2025. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)

By LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ

Year 1 of President Donald Trump’s quest to conduct the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history turned towns and cities into battlegrounds.

Americans were inundated, first slowly and then all at once, with videos of masked agents, seemingly everywhere, rounding up immigrants — in parks and on sidewalks, in parking lots and construction sites, at farms and factories.

Thousands of immigrants were detained, their absence evident at construction sites in Florida and meatpacking plants in Nebraska. Raids at those sites gave way to the detention of migrants in New York courthouses and of workers at Los Angeles car washes.

In just under a year, about 500,000 people would be deported in an unrelenting campaign celebrated by those who saw it as long overdue and lamented by those who saw it as inhumane.

Over the year, the deportations forced Americans, even those who welcomed the stepped-up enforcement, to reckon with the human consequences of rounding up and expelling people from their streets.

In the kitchen of a buzzy New York pub and bistro, where a Guatemalan line cook stopped showing up, a chef was left scrambling for answers. Electric bicycles littered sidewalks in Chicago and Washington after the riders were detained while making deliveries.

Trump, catapulted back to the White House by voters whose views had shifted sharply against illegal immigration, was making good on his campaign promise to enforce immigration laws to their fullest extent.

Americans were confronted with a swelling deportation force that, under pressure to meet arrest quotas, traded targeted raids for sweeps that critics saw as indiscriminate and supporters as vital. Protesters clashed with armed agents as the dragnet widened.

The all-of-government effort was stunning, an abrupt pendulum swing for the country. For decades, a fragile, tacit understanding had allowed millions of immigrants lacking legal status to build lives here, largely without fear of deportation, so long as they worked hard and stayed out of trouble.

In less than a year, that status quo was upended.

Shutting down the border

The 2,000-mile stretch of desert, mountains and steel walls that separates Mexico from the United States is unrecognizable from just a few years ago, when illegal crossings by hundreds of thousands of people generated disorder.

Now, few dare cross.

Under President Joe Biden, the Border Patrol apprehended an average of 5,000 people a day crossing the border illegally, millions of whom were released into the country while awaiting asylum hearings.

Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border on the day he was inaugurated, vowing to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”

He immediately halted asylum for people seeking refuge through the border, using a contested legal justification that relied on his declaration of a state of “invasion.” Now, nearly all migrants are quickly turned back at the border.

And under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, they are being charged with illegal entry, a federal misdemeanor that can carry up to six months in prison or up to two years for repeat offenders.

The deterrent policies have proved consequential: The Border Patrol apprehended an average of 258 people a day in October, the lowest levels at the southern border since 1970.

“It’s a breath of fresh air,” a Border Patrol officer told The New York Times in October. “Total 180. Now, we have the time to do our jobs properly.

The decrease in crossings has eased the strain on cities on both sides of the border, leading to the closure of shelters that once provided temporary housing to thousands of migrants.

In El Paso, Texas, dozens of bunk beds sit empty in Annunciation House, the network of shelters where Ruben Garcia has welcomed refugees for nearly 50 years.

For Garcia, 77, the empty beds at his diminished shelter system are a reminder of the way that the United States had turned its back on vulnerable migrants fleeing violence, poverty and repression.

“The strength of the United States has been the country’s willingness to identify with other human beings,” said Garcia, the director of the shelter network. “This year has been about losing our souls, losing our souls and pretending that we’re not seeing what is happening.”

Deportations begin in surprising places

On a cold night in March, plainclothes agents entered the lobby of an apartment building in upper Manhattan and arrested a recent Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist as he was returning home with his wife.

An Ivy League campus, it turned out, became the unlikely location of the first salvo in New York. The raids that New York leaders had envisioned at the city’s migrant shelters — which began closing and emptying as border crossings dropped — did not materialize.

Instead, federal agents arrived at the city’s immigration courthouses, where migrants intent on following the rules show up for routine court hearings and check-ins. The courtrooms soon evolved into convenient grounds for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to easily apprehend thousands of migrants.

On a parallel track, Trump through executive decree sought to restrict birthright citizenship, instituted travel bans and revoked humanitarian programs that had shielded migrants from deportation to unstable countries.

ICE launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign warning immigrants to leave or be “hunted down.” And the agency began deporting some immigrants to countries they were not from and to which they had no ties.

Raids in democratic cities

Upset with the pace of deportations, Trump officials began focusing on Democratic cities with so-called sanctuary policies that Republicans argued protected immigrants at the expense of public safety.

It began in Los Angeles. Agents barged into Home Depot parking lots to detain day laborers. They searched for vendors in the alleyways of the city’s fashion district.

Protests against the raids flared in Los Angeles, home to the country’s largest population of immigrants without legal status, prompting the president to send National Guard troops and Marines in June.

A telegenic Border Patrol commander, Gregory Bovino, emerged as the face of the operations, turning the raids into a made-for-TV roadshow.

After gaining Trump’s admiration, Bovino, trailed by cameras filming promotional videos of officers arresting immigrants, was sent to another Democratic city about 2,000 miles away: Chicago.

Unmarked vehicles and military-style convoys soon roamed downtown Chicago and predominantly Latino blocks. Agents scooped up Hispanic men, relying heavily, critics said, on racial profiling.

One of the first to be detained was Leodegario Martínez Barradas, a vendor from Mexico who sold flowers at an intersection in the Archer Heights neighborhood on weekends to provide for his six children.

On Sept. 7, agents handcuffed him and whisked him away, leaving behind scattered flowers. He was deported to Mexico a few days later.

“It’s sad because they’re not only taking people with problems with the law, but also people who are just working,” he said in a video posted on social media from Mexico.

Bovino defended his tactics, saying that the deportations aligned with the will of the people: “We’re in lock step with Ma and Pa America, with the taxpayer.”

Adopting a playbook across U.S. cities

Chicagoans pushed back. Residents, recording with their phones, honked their horns and crowded around agents.

“This is not making anybody safer,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said at the time. “It’s a show of intimidation.”

All told, federal officials said that they detained more than 10,000 immigrants in Los Angeles and more than 3,000 in Illinois and Indiana, leaving Trump’s supporters encouraged.

“There are legal ways to get here, and they should be used,” said Aaron Dahl, 49, a Tennessee resident who voted for Trump.

But the arrests, and the debates over whom ICE was targeting, also deepened partisan divides.

ICE singled out the arrests of immigrants with criminal records, releasing mug shots and rap sheets. But the agency’s own data revealed a more nuanced picture.

One-third of detainees had no criminal record. As processing and detention centers began to fill with migrants, the share of people arrested with past violent convictions, such as robbery or homicide, was down to 7% through mid-October, compared with 15% in 2024.

Critics, angered by detentions they denounced as cruel, described the arrests as kidnappings, with some insulting ICE officers as “pigs” and “Nazis” during protests. Polls began showing signs that Americans were upset by the aggressive tactics.

Matt Newton, 49, a Republican from Cookeville, Tennessee, who voted for Trump, said he supported the crackdown but was grappling with the deportation of law-abiding immigrants.