Deportees at the border gate separating Haiti from the Dominican Republic. —AP

Agencies WASHINGTON

During  his first month in office, President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people, previously unpublished US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden's administration.

A senior Trump administration official and experts said deportations were poised to rise in the coming months as Trump opens up new avenues to ramp up arrests and removals. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Biden-era deportation numbers appeared "artificially high" because of higher levels of illegal immigration.

Trump campaigned for the White House promising to deport millions of illegal immigrants in the largest deportation operation in the US. history. Yet initial figures suggest Trump could struggle to match higher deportation rates during the last full year of the Biden administration when large numbers of migrants were caught crossing illegally, making them easier to deport. The acting director of  the  Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Caleb Vitello, was reassigned on Friday due to a failure to meet expectations, a Trump official and two other people familiar with the matter said.

The deportation effort could take off in several months, aided by agreements from Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica to take deportees from other nations, the sources said. The US military has assisted in more than a dozen military deportation flights to Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and India. The Trump administration has also flown Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay. Trump said in late January that his administration would prepare to detain up to 30,000 migrants there despite pushback from civil liberties groups.

The military-assisted deportations could grow considering the Pentagon's vast budget and ability to surge resources, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert with the Washington Office on Latin America think tank. Meanwhile, the administration is moving to make it easier to arrest deportable migrants without criminal records and to detain more people with final deportation orders.