A DHS “Remigration Report” touts 3.3 million removals, asylum denials at 94% and naturalizations down 75% as “victories,” recasting as goals what officials once told courts were security measures — even as the path to citizenship narrows, and the economy sheds workers
By Caribbean Television Network (CTN)
The Trump administration has begun openly celebrating something its officials once defended only as a matter of security: fewer immigrants in the United States, and fewer immigrants becoming citizens.
In an October 2 post on X, the Department of Homeland Security hailed what it called “net negative migration for the first time in HALF a CENTURY,” declaring that “Americans are amassing victories NEVER seen before thanks to President Trump.” The post, analyzed by Forbes contributor and National Foundation for American Policy head Stuart Anderson, carried a graphic headed “REMIGRATION REPORT” and listed as “victories” a set of hard numbers: 3.3 million removals, 250,000 visas revoked, asylum denials at 94%, more than 2,600 local “287(g)” enforcement agreements, travel barred from 39 countries, and naturalizations down 75%.
The framing is its own story. As Anderson notes, the administration had told judges and the public that these policies were needed for national security or other reasons — not to shrink immigration and citizenship as ends in themselves. The DHS post, and a separate White House message, celebrate exactly the outcome the government’s court filings and Federal Register notices did not name as their purpose.
The word on the graphic — “remigration” — has drawn particular alarm.
As The Washington Post reported, the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration has been redirected into an “Office of Remigration,” prompting one department staffer to write that the term’s apparent meaning was “ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants.” The refugee bureau’s website no longer describes its mission as admitting or assisting refugees, but as “ending mass and illegal migration.”
The turning point, analysts say, was an August 15, 2025 USCIS memo instructing officers to take a “holistic approach” and require applicants to show “positive attributes”—not merely the absence of problems. “That alone would lead to more denials and probably slower processing,” said Efren Hernandez, a former USCIS supervisory policy analyst who now runs EH3 Immigration Consulting. He said the memo also carried “a clear undertone” nudging officers away from approving borderline cases: “Officers are likely not to want to be seen as too permissive and having too high an approval rate.”
The result shows in the numbers. The naturalization denial rate more than doubled, from 8.4% to 20.1%, between January 2025 and July 2026. A rule proposed in June 2026 would raise the citizenship application fee by 75%, from $710 to $1,280 online, and by 80%, from $760 to $1,330 on paper. And the civics test itself has grown harder: under a 2025 change by USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, applicants must now answer 12 of up to 20 questions drawn from a pool of 128, up from 6 of 10 from a pool of 100.
The same tightening runs through the humanitarian system.
With asylum denials at 94% — a rate a September report by World Relief and Open Doors US tied in part to the firing of immigration judges who approved more cases — the administration has made it exceedingly difficult for someone fleeing persecution to win protection in the United States.
Refugee admissions have been cut to a record low and redirected by race. As CNN and ABC News reported, the president’s refugee determination for the coming year prioritizes white South Africans, while two Christian groups noted the administration admitted no persecuted Christian refugees in fiscal year 2026. When the White House celebrated a Cato Institute finding that legal immigration from majority-Muslim nations had been cut 96% since 2024, Cato’s David Bier — whose data it cited — replied that the administration was “violating the law and harming Americans.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations argued the boast itself was evidence courts should weigh: the government “cannot continue to credibly claim religious neutrality while presenting exclusion associated with Muslim nations as a measure of success.”
The administration has argued the trade-off is worth it for American workers. Data compiled by the NFAP and federal agencies do not support that.
The U.S. civilian labor force has fallen by 434,000 since January 2025 — putting Trump, by NFAP’s analysis, on track to be the only president in the past century to preside over a shrinking labor force across his term. The number of foreign-born workers has dropped by more than one million over the same period, against government projections that had assumed 2.2 million more. NFAP estimates the policies could cost the economy roughly 19 million worker-years by 2028 and 102 million by 2035, shave nearly a third off the annual growth rate, and add some $1.7 trillion to the federal debt by 2035.
Meanwhile, the promised benefit to U.S.-born workers has not materialized. Their unemployment rate was essentially flat — 4.2% in September 2026 against 4.3% when Trump took office — and real average hourly earnings fell 0.3% from August 2025 to August 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry groups have reported shortages of truck drivers, meatpacking workers and construction labor as enforcement removes workers from the economy, pushing some prices up rather than down.
The boasting arrives as the politics shift. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found Republicans have lost their longtime edge on immigration, with 41% of voters now trusting Democrats to handle it against 38% for Republicans. And The New York Times, interviewing Hispanic voters across the country, found many “furious” over the president’s handling of immigration and the economy — the issues they had expected him to fix — with Democrats leading among likely Hispanic voters by roughly 35 points on the generic congressional ballot.
For the immigrants living inside these numbers — the ones whose citizenship applications now sit longer and cost more, whose relatives abroad can no longer be sponsored, whose asylum claims are denied nine times in ten — the administration’s “victories” read as something else entirely. What the government is now celebrating in capital letters is, for them, the closing of the doors they were standing in.
https://ctninfo.com/?p=44822&preview=true
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/10/05/trump-administration-boasts-of-reducing-immigration-and-naturalization/
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