Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivy held a press conference this week announcing the arrest of a Guatemalan national for sexual battery, describing in direct terms how the victim gave the man a ride and was then forcibly held down and assaulted when she declined his sexual advance, with the attack interrupted only because a phone call connected and the attacker fled when he heard another voice on the line. Ivy partnered with ICE immediately upon arrest and was unapologetic about both the partnership and the plain language he used to describe the situation. Tom Homan, meanwhile, spent part of his weekend having lunch at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, the ICE detention facility that Democratic lawmakers had characterized as running hunger strikes and offering inhumane conditions, where he ate spaghetti and meat sauce, beans, green beans, bread, drinks, and dessert from a tray identical to what detainees were receiving and reported the food was good and the facility well-run.
Jeffrey Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to put the policy results behind those individual stories in quantitative context.
Anderson said the Congressional Budget Office has now revised its estimates of the illegal immigrant population in the United States and concluded that there are currently 1.5 million fewer illegal immigrants in the country than would have been present had Biden administration policies continued. The CBO described the decline as driven largely by administrative actions taken since January 20th, 2025, which Anderson said means in plain English that the federal government is now enforcing federal immigration law, something the Biden administration refused to do. The 1.5 million figure represents a population equivalent to the city of San Antonio.
The comparison against the Biden baseline is stark. The CBO estimated that under Biden’s policies the last year of his term would have added 1.1 million illegal immigrants to the country. Instead, under Trump there has been a decrease of approximately 400,000. More than ninety percent of that success, Anderson said, has come not from interior enforcement operations but from simply stopping the practice of releasing people into the country upon arrival at the southern border. Under Biden in his final year, 1.5 million people were deliberately released into the United States after arriving at the border, in defiance of federal law that requires detention during asylum proceedings. Under Trump that number has dropped to approximately 80,000, a reduction of roughly ninety-five percent, with the residual primarily accounted for by the legal requirement to release unaccompanied minors to sponsor families.
Looking at the three-year comparison the CBO has now projected, Anderson said the numbers reveal the full scope of what Biden’s open borders policy produced and what Trump’s enforcement is reversing. In the last three years of Biden, 5.7 million illegal immigrants were added to the United States on net. In the first three years of Trump, the CBO projects a net reduction of one million. The difference between those two trajectories is 6.7 million people, which Anderson said exceeds the combined populations of Los Angeles and Phoenix.
He placed these numbers in longer historical context, noting that on the eve of the bicentennial in 1970 the foreign-born population of the United States was 4.7 percent. Under Biden it reached 16.8 percent, shattering records set during the great immigration waves of the nineteenth century. He said Americans have a clear instinct that something went profoundly wrong with the immigration system under the previous administration, and the data confirms that instinct is not a media narrative but a measurable reality.
Anderson was careful to note that the progress, while historic and material, does not mean the border crisis is solved. The enforcement posture that produced these results depends entirely on the political will of whoever holds the executive branch. If a future administration reverses Trump’s policies, the country will return immediately to the trends that characterized the Biden years. He said what is needed is a sustained period of serious enforcement long enough to bring illegal immigration down to levels consistent with the country’s historical norms, followed by an immigration system in which legal immigration functions predictably and assimilation can occur at a manageable pace. The current results are encouraging, but the scale of what was inherited is so vast that even a dramatic policy reversal requires years to work through the system, and the individual tragedies still occurring, the assaults, the traffic fatalities caused by unlicensed illegal immigrant drivers, and the missing unaccompanied children whose cases will follow Javier Becerra as a political liability in California’s governor’s race, are the ongoing cost of how thoroughly the previous administration abdicated its constitutional duty.