On day one of Donald Trump’s second term as president, he issued a wave of executive orders to radically expand the enforcement of immigration law. It was the first step toward Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations—the “largest,” he pledged, in the country’s history.
What followed, throughout 2025, was an aggressive campaign that included Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at workplaces such as farms; the deployment of National Guard units in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles; and a Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for racial profiling during immigration enforcement.
These actions played out in stark images that have come to define Trump’s immigration agenda: scenes of federal agents—often with masks covering their faces—tackling people inside courthouses, or protesters gathering en masse to face off against National Guard members.
Getty Images photographers captured many of those scenes. And as they did, they witnessed the chaos of Trump’s immigration enforcement firsthand.
In one picture photographed in a New York City courthouse, photographer Michael M. Santiago saw a family exit their immigration hearing when Border Patrol agents approached the man, asking if he was a specific person.
“He said he was not, but the agents did not believe him,” Santiago says in a statement to Fast Company. “The wife immediately began advocating for her husband, stepping between him and the agents and telling them they would have to take all of them. As agents attempted to detain the man, the daughter and older son began to cry.”
Eventually, the agent did verify that the man was not the person they were looking for.
In another shot by photographer Ryan Murphy, two Border Patrol agents wrestle a man to the ground inside a fast-food restaurant under construction. Murphy had been following Border Patrol vehicles when they stopped at that construction site.
“After hearing a commotion inside, I ran into the building to find this scene unfolding in front of me,” he says. “This time it happened at a Panda Express construction site, but it could have been the parking lot of a department store, a hair salon, or a gas station. All places you and I would visit on a regular day.”
Photographer Scott Olson photographed residents of Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood crowded against a door, watching as Border Patrol agents patrolled their street.
“Residents in the neighborhood were guarded and resentful of the agents’ presence because a month earlier a violent confrontation occurred nearby with them and a woman,” he says.
After that earlier incident, people poured into the street to confront the agents, and were then hit with flash grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls. “All charges against the woman, who was a U.S. citizen, were later dropped,” Olson adds.
Getty photographers also captured the protests against this enforcement. In Los Angeles, during a rally against the National Guard’s presence there, a police officer is seen pointing his crowd-control projectile gun seemingly straight at the photographer.
A different kind of protest occurred on a cannabis farm in Camarillo, California. During an immigration raid, protestors blocked the road and ended up in an “hours-long standoff” with federal agents in the field, says photographer Mario Tama. Jaime Alanis Garcia, a 56-year-old farmworker, fell roughly 30 feet during that raid and died days later.
The Department of Homeland Security says that it deported more than 600,000 people. Many others, though, chose to self-deport—1.9 million, according to DHS—spurred by fear or even, in some cases, because ICE promised them money to do so.
Andrea, a 28-year-old undocumented mother from Ecuador, chose to self-deport with her 7-year-old daughter after her husband was detained and deported.
“Photographing the immigrant experience in the U.S. is always delicate, but never more than in 2025 in an environment of so much fear, especially in the undocumented population,” says photographer John Moore, who photographed Andrea and her daughter on their flight back to Ecuador.
He first met Andrea through a Connecticut nonprofit that was helping her after her husband’s deportation. After sharing his previous work with her, he says, “she thought it important to share her family’s story so that Americans might better understand what she and millions of others are going through.”
