WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday directing the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to identify within a month the cities and states that are not complying with federal immigration laws, a White House official said Monday.

Last week, a federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from withholding federal funding from more than a dozen so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown.

Trump launched an aggressive enforcement campaign after taking office, surging troops to the southern border and pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The Republican president said the actions were needed after years of high illegal immigration under his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden.

At a press briefing, White House officials touted a steep decline in illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border during Trump’s first three months in office.

U.S. Border Patrol arrested 7,200 migrants illegally crossing the border in March, the lowest monthly total since 2000 and down from a peak of 250,000 in December 2023.

“We have the most secure border in the history of this nation and the numbers prove it,” Trump border czar Tom Homan said at the briefing.

In his first hundred days in office, Trump has moved to strip legal immigration status from hundreds of thousands of people, increasing the pool of those who can potentially be deported.

While arrests of immigrants in the U.S. illegally have spiked, deportations remain below last year’s levels under Biden when there were more people illegally crossing the border who could be quickly returned.

Deportations were down in Trump’s first three months in office from 195,000 last year to 130,000 this year, Reuters reported last week. Homan defended the figures and said it was not fair to compare them to Biden-era tallies.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities have been over capacity, with some 48,000 in custody as of early April, beyond the funded level of 41,500.

Homan said Texas military base Fort Bliss could be ready “in the very near future” to hold migrant detainees. The Trump administration has already been using the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sanctuary Standoff

Trump has criticized cities and states that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, labeling them “sanctuaries” and blaming them for releasing criminal offenders instead of coordinating their transfer to ICE.

The executive order planned for Monday, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, would build on Trump’s early efforts to pressure the jurisdictions to cooperate.

“President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday escalating his battle against Democratic-led states and cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” a White House official said.

U.S. officials arrested a Wisconsin judge on Friday and charged her with helping a man in her court briefly evade immigration authorities. The arrest triggered backlash from Democrats and immigrant rights advocates who raised concerns that immigrant victims may not feel safe in courthouses.

Homan defended the arrest, saying the administration would enforce laws prohibiting harboring of a person in the U.S. illegally.

“When you cross that line to [impeding law enforcement] or knowingly harboring and concealing an illegal alien from ICE, you will be prosecuted, judge or not,” he said.

Trump’s schedule calls for him to sign executive orders at 5 p.m. EST. Americans are split on Trump’s immigration approach, but he has a 45% approval rating on immigration, better than other major issues, a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-April found.

—

(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal and Angela Christy in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernadette Baum, William Maclean and Alistair Bell)