The First 100 Days: Trump Restores The Southern Border

The first 100 days of Trump 2.0 have been robust, to say the least. As of mid-afternoon Monday, the 47th president had signed 137 executive orders, according to the Federal Register. The A to Z orders cover everything from Artificial Intelligence to Zero-based regulatory budgeting.

While President Donald Trump’s second nonconsecutive term is a work in progress, there’s no doubt the aggressive executive has doggedly pursued an ambitious agenda in pursuit of his campaign mission statement to “Make America Great Again.” He seems to have succeeded in driving the left and its corporate media partners more unhinged than ever. If that was Trump’s goal, well, as President George W. Bush once said in a case of premature declaration, mission accomplished. 

As The Hill’s Brett Samuels noted in a piece published on Monday, Trump’s 99th day in office, the president, “largely through executive action, has moved to quickly deliver on a number of prominent campaign promises on immigration, tariffs and culture war issues.” 

Trump’s accomplishments are all the more impressive in the face of a violent leftist resistance movement, an overreaching activist judiciary, weak-kneed Republican lawmakers, and a hostile corporate media that has, according to an analysis by NewsBusters, choked the broadcast TV airwaves with blanket negative coverage of the Trump administration. 

Arguably the commander-in-chief’s greatest successes in the opening three-plus months of his second tour of duty have come in the administration’s work to secure the border. Trump wasted no time on that front. 

Exposing the Biden Lie

The president immediately declared a national emergency on the crisis at the U.S. southern border, confronting head-on the illegal immigration mess that his predecessor, President Joe Biden, left. The declaration directed the secretary of defense to send more military personnel to the border and ordered Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to finish the wall begun in the first Trump administration and stymied under Biden. It notes the “record-shattering 8.72 million” encounters that occurred at the southern border from Fiscal Year 2021 to FY ’24, “overwhelming border resources and endangering communities.”

Now 100 days in, the border has effectively been closed down to illegal immigrants, as Trump pledged on the campaign trail. 

“Essentially nobody is coming across that border illegally anymore,” Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told The Federalist Monday in an interview. “And Trump did it with the same authority that Biden had claimed he didn’t have. Biden insisted he needed legislation with all kinds of amnesties because he couldn’t [stop illegal immigration] as the president. That was exposed as the lie that we knew it was.” 

The Biden administration promoted illegal immigration through sweeping asylum initiatives and legally suspect use of parole. 

‘A Far Cry’

The comparisons are staggering. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered 7,181 illegal immigrants at the southern border, according to the White House. That’s a whopping 95 percent decrease from the same month in 2024, when Border Patrol confronted 137,473 illegal aliens. Encounters were even higher in March of 2023 (163,672) and 2022 (211,181), the White House reported. 

U.S. Border Czar Tom Homan started as a Border Patrol agent more than 40 years ago and said he could not recall a single month since that the encounter numbers have been so low. 

“It is a far cry from the more than 11,000 a day that we saw for a time period under Biden … The last administration had the Border Patrol releasing millions of illegal aliens into the United States, which caused more and more to come,” Homan wrote earlier this month on X. “Thanks to President Trump and his game changing policies, those days are over. Thank you to the patriots of the Border Patrol who are making this country safe again!”

In his first 100 days in office, Biden took 94 executive actions on immigration, according to the leftist Migration Policy Institute. Said actions included ending Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, and reinstating “catch-and-release.” 

“These calculated actions resulted in a raging illegal immigration disaster. Massive surges of illegals — including criminals, gang members, and terrorists — were constantly swarming our border, jeopardizing our national security and giving cartels free reign to push deadly fentanyl into every community throughout the United States,” wrote Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., in a column this week titled, “A Historic Turnaround.” 

“In President Trump’s first 100 days in office, he has delivered the most secure border in modern American history – and he didn’t need legislation to do it,” Cole wrote. 

Counting the ‘Wins’

In a closer look at Trump’s first 100 days, the Heritage Foundation Counts “100 Wins,” many of them in the battle to secure the border and deport criminals. Among the successes, Heritage notes that the president: 

› Signed the Laken Riley Act, a bipartisan bill demanding the detention of illegal immigrants accused of violent crimes. 

› Deported more at-large illegal aliens (those arrested in the interior USA) in February 2025 than Biden did in all of FY2024. 

› Reimplemented the “Remain in Mexico” program.

› Moved to end birthright citizenship. 

› Opened Guantanamo Bay for illegal alien detentions.

› Turned the CBP One App into the CBP Home App to facilitate self-deportations.

› Issued an executive order preserving federal benefits for American citizens only.

› Revoked visas of foreign students at American universities who support Hamas, exhibit antisemitic behavior.  

‘Lawless Insurrection’

On Monday, Trump signed another three executive orders related to immigration, one on federal authority over immigration enforcement, another requiring state and federal officials to publish lists of sanctuary cities where officials refuse to cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, and an order requiring truck drivers to be proficient in English. The White House press release notes that some state and local officials continue to “violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.” The administration says such actions represent a “lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.”

But many of the Trump administration’s actions on securing the border and staunching the flood of illegal immigrants have been challenged by liberal activists and blocked by federal judges issuing broad injunctions that, according to constitutional law experts, exceed their authority. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments next month on the birthright citizen issue. Multiple courts have blocked the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport illegal immigrants with suspected ties to a violent gangs to a detention center in El Salvador. California Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes, a Biden nominee, on Monday issued the latest ruling halting deportation and pressing for extended constitutional rights for individuals in the country illegally.

Politically, Democrats have chosen to die on the hill of protecting due process for illegal immigrants accused of or convicted of violent crimes. The same party that cared little for due process in its drive to imprison political enemies is now screaming “injustice!” when criminal illegal aliens are sent packing. 

“I want President Trump to understand this is about freedom and that what he’s doing is undermining it,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore,, told reporters over the weekend at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Fox News reported. “It’s not going to end well for him because our nation is going to respond, and we are going to defend our Constitution and our freedom.”

‘Beyond Any One President’

Why the frenzy feeders in corporate media pushed out their usual polls in advance of the 100-day marker showing Trump’s support flagging, including on immigration, a Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll released this week shows more than two-thirds of respondents (69%) believe the Democratic Party is “out of touch” with the American people. Another 64 percent said the Republican Party is “out of touch.” A Rasmussen Reports poll released this week found 50 percent of likely U.S. voters trust Republicans more to handle immigration, while 39 percent trust Democrats. Another 11 percent of respondents were undecided. 

“This is one of the issues Trump was elected on,” Mehlman said, adding that the president has the advantage of Americans having witnessed the chaos the Biden administration created at the border and beyond over the past four years. 

The Federation for American Immigration Reform spokesman said executive orders only go so far, however. He said the Republican-led congress needs to pass legislation such as the Secure the Border Act while there’s still time. The proposal passed in the House last session but died in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Components included closing immigration loopholes and barring “catch and release,” as well completing the border wall and beefing up Customs and Border Protection operations. 

“That’s the sort of legislation that really would make a long-term difference and extend beyond any one president,” Mehlman said. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.