Randy and Carol Eiland are relieved they're no longer coming across migrants while horseback-riding near their New Mexico home.
In New York, Ildayra Varona Montecer isn't taking her green card for granted after she spent seven agonizing weeks in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
And in Indiana, Maryenis Morales Villa is caring for her baby daughter alone, after ICE deported her husband to Venezuela, before he could see a judge.
One hundred days in, President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown has rippled across the country like a shockwave, intensifying a dramatic decline in illegal border crossings and fueling a spike in immigrant arrests in cities and towns nationwide. Deportations are down from a year ago, in part because there are so few migrants at the border now.
The low removal numbers are "a source of great frustration" for the Trump administration and "play into the extreme measures they've taken," said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Flying immigrants to a mega prison in El Salvador. Attempting to cancel birthright citizenship. Declaring some "alien enemies." Detaining international student activists and foreign travelers. Erasing some immigrants' legal status.
"If you come to this country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face," Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a video filmed inside the CECOT prison in El Salvador. She stood before a backdrop of dozens of tattooed men, heads shaven, crowded behind bars.
The administration has broadcast its toughest measures on TV, social media and in paid advertisements, to discourage migrants from coming and convince those here illegally to leave. It's not clear how many immigrants have chosen to self-deport.
Millions of Americans voted for Trump in part for his hard stance on immigration, but polls suggest his support is slipping as campaign promises become reality.
Trump has vowed to target immigrants with criminal records; those arrests are up in the first 100 days. But to meet his goal of 1 million deportations in the first year, federal agents have instituted a far-reaching crackdown that has swept in even those undergoing a lawful immigration process.
"There's a lot of pressure on ICE agents to have quotas now," said Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Immigration Lab at American University in Washington, D.C. "That's why they're going for minors, women and people with no criminal records."
The government would need to remove more than 80,000 people per month to reach 1 million deportations, at an estimated cost of $88 billion, according to the American Immigration Council. So far the administration hasn't come close to that pace.
Trump's border czar Tom Homan on April 28 said the administration deported 139,000 people in the first 100 days - putting the administration on track to remove roughly half a million people this year. But the government hasn't released data to support the figure.
"Removing 1 million people a year was a lot easier when there were 1 million people crossing the border," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies. "The administration's goal is much more difficult than for any prior administration."
Still, Trump is setting up the infrastructure to dramatically increase deportations in coming months, experts say, even as immigrant advocates fight to stop many of his measures in court.
On his first day in office, Trump declared a national emergency at the border. That opened the door to a flurry of executive actions: He deployed the military to the U.S.-Mexico border; extended a Biden-era policy suspending access to asylum; and deputized half a dozen federal agencies to assist ICE's 6,000 immigration agents.
At the southern New Mexico border, the Eilands have seen the changes in their own backyard.
The couple's home has picture windows that frame a desert landscape, willowy green mesquite and a brown mesa in the distance. They ride their horses, Tess and Zicoma, on trails that, for the past five years, have also been trekked by migrants.
Evidence of the surge in illegal crossings under the Biden administration was everywhere, they said. Discarded backpacks, water bottles, migrants hiding in the brush. Two years ago in April, they found a migrant woman leaning oddly against a neighbor's fence: She was dead. Twice more, they stumbled on human remains.
"The traffic's just less by quantum leaps," Randy Eiland said. "Now we don't go out riding thinking, 'Are we going to find a body today?'"
After peaking in late 2023, illegal border crossings have dropped to their lowest point in the 21st century. Migrant encounters fell below 8,000 in March from more than 137,000 in the same month a year ago, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The decline in illegal crossings began during Biden's last year in office, after the administration restricted asylum and Mexico ramped up its own immigration enforcement, preventing migrants from reaching the border.
The reality that border crossings have been falling for months "undermines the narrative that there's some sort of crisis at the border," said Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration. "There just isn't."
Originally from Panama, Ildayra Varona Montecer was a U.S. legal permanent resident when federal agents turned her over to ICE at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as she was returning from vacation in February.
She had a green card, she told them. It was misplaced, but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had already notified her that a replacement card was on its way. USA TODAY reviewed the replacement card notice.
That didn't stop ICE from detaining her for more than 50 days. She was held in a Louisiana detention center with some 90 women in her dormitory.
"Some days I couldn't believe I was locked up," she said by phone from her home in Long Island, New York. "There were so many people who shouldn't have been there."
The Trump administration has arrested tens of thousands of immigrants with criminal records or pending criminal charges, but the crackdown has also swept in thousands of people with low-level immigration violations - or none at all.
The percentage of people detained by ICE with nothing more than an immigration violation increased from 6% of the total in January to 18% in April.
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, said the data on criminality doesn't detail the charges or convictions.
"We don't have a good sense of 'is that worst of the worst?' Or is that petty theft, a traffic violation, too many parking tickets?" she said.
Panamanian native Varona Montecer, 38, has picked up her life where she left off after her arrest in February. She's back to driving Uber and Amazon deliveries.
Her grandparents, siblings and children are all U.S. citizens; her mother is a legal resident. Varona Montecer has applied for U.S. citizenship, as well. While she was detained, she spoke regularly to her 20-year-old daughter in calls on expensive video lines, but her 17-year-old son couldn't bear it, she said.
"My son suffered the most," she said. "He couldn't see me locked up. 'How can you be in there?' he'd say. I tell him now, 'It's over.' Here we are and we keep on going."
The Trump administration has quickly undone policies that protected some immigrants from deportation. In its first 100 days, the administration canceled two key programs that allowed Venezuelans and others to live and work legally in the U.S.: humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status.
ICE has also accused Venezuelans, in high-profile cases, of membership in the violent Tren de Aragua prison gang - often without evidence or criminal charges. ICE has transported hundreds to El Salvador's CECOT mega prison.
Between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 714,000 encounters with Venezuelan migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Many sought asylum, including Walbes José Quintero, who turned himself in to Border Patrol agents alongside his then-pregnant Colombian wife, Maryenis Morales Villa.
Days after crossing the border in November 2023, Morales Villa gave birth to a stillborn daughter in El Paso, Texas. But while Border Patrol released her to a church shelter, agents deported Quintero back to