By TX3DNews Staff | April 16, 2025
As immigration rhetoric once again takes center stage under President Trump’s second term, Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) has wasted no time grabbing the spotlight. In a recent X post, he boasted that over 100,000 undocumented migrants have been deported since January 20—a figure that holds up. But while Self is busy fueling outrage at the border, he’s conspicuously silent on a far more immediate threat to his own district: the economic squeeze TX-3 families and businesses are already feeling from Trump’s tariff war.
According to data from ICE and corroborated by outlets like Newsweek and Fox News, the Trump administration has indeed deported over 100,000 people in its first three months. Of those, over 28,000 were interior removals between January 20 and March 11. That averages out to around 3,887 deportations per week.
That may sound like a dramatic ramp-up—but when you compare it to the final six months of the Biden administration, it’s not even close. Between July and December 2024, ICE removed more than 271,000 individuals, which breaks down to over 11,000 deportations per week. Trump’s current pace is actually lower than Biden’s.
Of course, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Under Biden, DHS leaned heavily on Title 42 and expanded enforcement during the late-2024 border surge—driving deportation totals to their highest level since 2014. But notably, this didn’t require deporting vulnerable individuals to countries with horrific human rights records or stuffing them into foreign mega-prisons as political theater. There’s a difference between enforcement and cruelty—and voters know it.
The Trump administration has leaned heavily on optics: publicized arrests, tough rhetoric, and promises like the goal to deport one million people in 2025—a figure experts have called wildly unrealistic. “You can’t scale that without congressional funding and due process delays,” said former DHS official Theresa Cardinal Brown in an interview with El País. “It’s just not feasible given current capacity.”
And let’s be honest: raw numbers are only one piece of the puzzle. From late January to early March, Trump’s daily deportation average was around 661 per day. During the same period in 2024 under Biden, the average was about 742—a nearly 11% higher rate.
Yet Representative Self remains fixated on one narrative: that Trump’s return means immigration is finally being “taken seriously.” But for all the social media cheerleading, he’s been stunningly silent on the economic realities facing his own district—particularly the fallout from Trump’s tariff war reboot. Manufacturers in Collin and Denton counties are already facing higher input costs, and small business owners are bracing for more price hikes. Self hasn’t said a word.
The contrast is telling. Immigration enforcement gets a press release and a digital high-five. Economic harm? Crickets.
It’s also important to remember the difference between deportations and expulsions. Formal deportations involve due process and legal review. Title 42 expulsions—used by both Biden and Trump—allow for quick removals without court proceedings. Over a million such expulsions occurred in 2021 alone.
Critics of both administrations have raised concerns about the human toll—family separations, prolonged detention, and due process challenges. But there’s another danger: using these numbers as political weapons without discussing broader context.
For constituents in TX-3, this isn’t just about immigration statistics—it’s about leadership that shows up for real issues. Yet there’s been no mention from Rep. Keith Self about the mounting backlogs in North Texas immigration courts—something that affects families across the board. Nor has he addressed the economic whiplash caused by Trump’s shifting trade policies and the very real pain they’re inflicting on TX-3 communities.
Yes, the Trump administration has deported over 100,000 people since January, and those are real numbers. But Biden deported far more in his final months. While Self is busy celebrating one data point online, he remains silent on the ones that actually hit home for the people he was elected to represent.
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