The nation’s immigrant population has declined significantly since President Donald Trump took office in January, new research shows.
And the trend is likely to continue since the Trump administration announced plans to expand its military presence and immigration raids to more cities.
“In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States — the largest number ever recorded,” Pew Research Center reported in a study released in August.
But by June that figure had fallen to 51.9 million as immigrants left the country or were deported in greater numbers than those who arrived in the first six months of the year. It was the first decline in immigrant population since the 1960s, Pew said.
The share of U.S. residents who are immigrants dropped from “a recent historic high” of 15.8% to 15.4% in that span, while the share of immigrants in the workforce fell from 20% to 19% — a loss of 750,000 workers.
Shifts in political policies account for much of the declines, Pew explained.
“In his first 100 days since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump took 181 executive actions on immigration to curtail the arrival of new immigrants and deport noncitizen immigrants. The full effects of these policies remain to be seen, but already they are contributing to a declining immigrant population — especially the unauthorized immigrant population.”
The previous administration had a role in the trend, as well, the Pew report adds. “In June 2024, President Joe Biden announced new restrictions on asylum applications, leading to a sharp decline in border encounters with immigrants seeking asylum protections.”
According to 2023 figures, 23.8 million (46%) of immigrants in the U.S. were naturalized citizens, 14 million (27%) were unauthorized and 11.9 million (23%) were lawful permanent residents, Pew says.
Among those who were unauthorized “about 6 million (or a little more than 40%) had some form of temporary protection from deportation, with some also having a permit to work in the U.S.”
But undocumented immigrants without criminal records and those with protections like asylum, humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status have not been safe from the Trump administration’s ongoing detention and deportation campaign.
And now the U.S. is preparing to push its combined immigration and so-called “anti-crime” efforts into other American cities, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on CBS’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.
“I think there’s a lot of cities that are dealing with crime and violence right now. And so, we haven’t taken anything off the table. We’ve been making sure that we have the resources and the equipment to go in,” Noem said.
The administration has said it wants to expand major sweeps like those already under way in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., but critics say the administration is selectively targeting Democratic jurisdictions.
“Democrat-run cities are plagued with crime because they choose for it to be that way. It’s not an accident — it’s a masterclass in failure,” according to a White House social media post.
But news organizations that have fact-checked the claim report conservatives may need to look in the mirror before making such claims.
“Six Republican-led states are sending a collective 1,200 National Guard troops to assist Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C. But the states those troops came from have higher crime rates than the nation’s capital,” The New Republic reported.
But Noem claimed the choice of target cities is not about partisanship.
“Every single city is evaluated for what we need to do there to make it safer,” Noem said on the Sunday morning news show. “We absolutely are not looking through the viewpoint at anything we’re doing with a political lens.”