Trump's return to office has seen sweeping changes to immigration enforcement

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump promoted his immigration and border security record during his State of the Union address, highlighting how the number of migrants arriving at the southern border plummeted since he returned to office in January 2025.

But he made scant mention of the fallout from enforcement operations in places such as Minneapolis and Chicago, where residents demonstrated against tactics by federal officers. Two U.S. citizens were shot and killed in Minneapolis in January, leading to widespread opposition to the operation and more broadly how immigration officers were fulfilling their mandate from the Republican president.

“Today our border is secure,” Trump told Congress in his speech Tuesday night. “We now have the strongest and most secure border in American history by far. In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.”

Immigration has long been Trump's signature issue and a top reason he won a second term in 2024. His first year back in the White House saw sweeping changes in enforcement and an infusion of billions of dollars to the agencies tasked with carrying out his agenda. That is reshaping how enforcement will look for the rest of Trump's tenure, from the number of immigrants detained to how few are winning asylum cases.

Here's a look at how his administration has performed when it comes to six key immigration indicators.

While Joe Biden was president, Republicans constantly pointed to the flow of migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as a crisis that they blamed on the Democrat.

The number of people arrested trying to enter the U.S. illegally hit a high of nearly 250,000 in December 2023 and then started to fall throughout the rest of Biden’s term.

In December 2024, the last full month before Trump was sworn in, the number of arrests was at a little over 46,000. By February 2025, it was less than 8,000 and has stayed around that level or lower since. It was 6,070 in January.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement promised a new era of enforcement, loosening restrictions placed on those who could be arrested and removed. The result was a spike in ICE arrests.

In December 2024, ICE recorded 8,507 arrests. In 2025, that climbed to 17,000 by February, neared 30,000 by June and reached 32,771 by September, according to information gathered by the University of California, Berkeley’s, Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Associated Press. The last release of data was from the middle of October, before the Minneapolis crackdown.

As the number of arrests has surged, so has the number of immigrants being held in ICE's network of detention facilities across the country.

The Department of Homeland Security is receiving $45 billion to build, buy or rent new facilities to house immigrants who have been arrested and not yet deported.

ICE releases information every two weeks on the number of people in their facilities. That number fluctuates daily as people are brought into the system or let out, either because they are released on bond — an increasingly rare occurrence — or because they're deported.

In December 2024, the average daily detention numbers hovered just under 40,000 people. Under Trump, it has climbed dramatically. The number reached 70,000 by February of this year. With the money ICE now has, the agency eventually can detain around 100,000 immigrants or more.

ICE received $45 billion in new money from Congress to step up immigration enforcement and border security, and it has been on a spending spree. It has been trying to rent or buy more space to detain immigrants and working with conservative states to open facilities with catchy names such as “Alligator Alcatraz" or “Speedway Slammer.”

Roughly $30 billion is going toward hiring 10,000 deportation officers. An additional $46 billion is for finishing the border wall that Trump promised during his first term. More money is being used for such things as hiring more Customs and Border Protection officers and bolstering immigration courts.

The number of immigrants seeking asylum after arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has ballooned in recent years, leading to massive backlogs in immigration courts.

Increasingly, those people are seeing their cases rejected under the Trump administration.

According to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the percentage of asylum applicants who ultimately saw their applications denied in court ranged from a high of 60% to a low of 40% in the years before Trump's first term. They then climbed every year that Trump was in office before falling again during the Biden administration.

But according to the data, asylum rejection rates jumped by 22.5% during the first year of Trump's second term.

The Trump administration has repeatedly portrayed its mass deportation efforts as a way to get rid of immigrants who have committed crimes or are a danger to society, calling them “the worst of the worst.”

But data from the Deportation Data Project shows that the percentage of people arrested by ICE with criminal histories has been going down steadily.

Just before Trump took office, about 86% of the arrests that ICE made were for people with criminal backgrounds — meaning they had been convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S. separate from entering the country illegally, which is a civil offense.

That has been in decline, and as of mid-October about 55% had a criminal background while 45% did not. Critics point out that if someone has been arrested for a crime, it does not necessarily mean that person committed a serious felony such as murder. It's often minor crimes like shoplifting.

Part of the reason is that immigration enforcement officers are making more collateral arrests. When ICE pursues a specific target who may have a criminal record, officers can arrest others they come across as long as those people are in the country illegally.

Historically, most of the people ICE arrested have been transferred from state or local jails and prisons. ICE still does that, but under the Trump administration the agency also is using other tactics to bolster arrest numbers. That includes raiding worksites or targeting people showing up for their immigration court dates or when they show up for their regular check-ins with the agency.

President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times via AP, Pool)

PARIS (AP) — After months of pressure, the Louvre has a new director.

Christophe Leribault was named to lead the landmark on Wednesday, half a day after the resignation of previous director Laurence des Cars. The leadership change at the world’s most-visited museum comes after the October crown jewels heist and a string of failures that battered confidence in one of the country’s most prized institutions.

The rapid handover is meant to restore order at a museum hit by a punishing run of crises: the heist, labor unrest, water leaks, aging infrastructure and a suspected, decade-long $12 million ticket fraud scheme.

It also protects a politically loaded project for President Emmanuel Macron, who has made the Louvre overhaul a signature cultural legacy plan as he eyes the end of his term next year.

The government cast Leribault, a veteran museum director, as the steady hand for a battered institution, with responsibility for both the Louvre’s security overhaul and its modernization.

An 18th-century specialist trained at the École du Louvre, Leribault has led France’s biggest museums, including the Petit Palais and the Musée d’Orsay.

He most recently ran Versailles, one of France’s biggest heritage sites, with heavy visitor traffic and an annual budget of about 170 million euros ($200 million).

His résumé makes him a crisis-era choice: a curator-administrator shaped by France’s museum system and used to public scrutiny, large crowds and the mechanics of state cultural power.

Des Cars was not just any museum chief. Appointed in 2021, she became the first woman to lead the Louvre — a symbolic break at a palace built for kings.

For many in France’s cultural world, her departure finally answered the question that had hung over the Louvre since the heist: How could a breach of that scale happen at one of the country’s most symbolic institutions and no top official fall?

Macron’s office accepted her resignation as an “act of responsibility,” while saying the museum now needs calm and fresh momentum for security and modernization projects.

On Tuesday, she told Le Figaro that she had become a lightning rod and could no longer carry out the museum’s transformation in the same institutional climate.

The 88 million-euro ($102 million) jewels heist was the trigger, but not the whole story.

Labor unrest, leaks, aging infrastructure and a separate ticket-fraud scandal had already left the Louvre looking, in Paris and beyond, like a famous institution losing control of the basics.

A wildcat strike in June stranded visitors outside the pyramid and laid bare worker anger over overcrowding, understaffing and other conditions.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press just days before des Cars’ resignation, the Louvre’s No. 2, general administrator Kim Pham, called fraud at a museum of this scale “statistically inevitable,” while also acknowledging shortcomings and saying controls had been tightened.

He cited the scale: 86,000 square meters, 35,000 works on display and about 9 million visitors a year.

Privately, Louvre officials and others in France’s museum world make a blunter point: Old stone buildings leak.

The Louvre is that problem multiplied by a thousand — a medieval-to-modern palace complex in the middle of a dense capital, not a contained site on the outskirts.

Pham made that argument in more diplomatic terms, describing the Louvre as a historic building with “many historical layers” dating back to the start of the 13th century.

The Louvre sits in central Paris, with tourist pressure, traffic, multiple access points and the daily wear that comes with being both monument and mass destination.

As Macron heads toward the end of his time in office — his final term ends next year — the Louvre overhaul has become his signature cultural project — his version of the big museum-and-monument gambles French presidents are often remembered for.

He announced the “Louvre New Renaissance” plan in January 2025, a project now expected to cost about 1.15 billion euros ($1.36 billion), according to the French state auditors.

It includes a new entrance near the Seine, new underground spaces, and a dedicated room for the “Mona Lisa” with timed access to ease the crush around the painting and improve visitor flow.

In France, presidents are often linked to major cultural works — Georges Pompidou with the Centre Pompidou, François Mitterrand with the national library, Jacques Chirac with the Quai Branly museum.

The Louvre is Macron’s project on that scale.

That is one reason some in France’s cultural world openly speculated why des Cars did not leave in October, right after the heist, even after offering her resignation: Macron had so much riding on the Louvre plan that an immediate departure risked making his flagship cultural project look like it was collapsing.

A key question is how far the museum has come in fortifying its security, and the answer is: not far enough or fast enough.

Findings of the French state auditor said the Louvre’s security overhaul is not expected to be completed until 2032, according to French media reports. The reports say that as of 2024, less than 40% of the museum rooms were equipped with cameras.

There have been concrete moves since the theft. Extra measures, including anti-intrusion devices and anti-vehicle barriers, were put in place by the end of 2025.

Des Cars also told lawmakers in November that the Louvre would install 100 external cameras by the end of 2026 and tighten coordination with police, including a police station within the Louvre estate.

People queue to enter the Louvre museum in Paris, Wednesday Feb. 25. 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

FILE - Laurence des Cars, director of Le Louvre museum, poses before a hearing at the Culture commission of the Senate, three days after historic jewels were stolen in a daring daylight heist, Oct. 22, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Emma Da Silva, File)

FILE Christophe Leribault, head of the Charteau de Versailles, poses March 29, 2024 in the park of the Chateau de Versailles, west of Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)

People queue to enter the Louvre museum in Paris, Wednesday Feb. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

The french flag flutters on the Louvre museum in Paris, Wednesday Feb. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)