Happy (Fiscal) New Year!

While most Americans (and most of the world) run on a calendar year that starts on January 1 and ends December 31, the federal government runs on a “fiscal year” that begins today, October 1. Tables and calculations will reset, and the results of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement efforts will come into clearer focus, unencumbered by results from the three-plus months at the end of the Biden administration that ended at noon on January 20. Get ready, because while the forecast is good, there are legal storms brewing in the area.

A Historical Perspective

The first fiscal day of the United States government was January 1, 1789, when the order established by the nascent constitution (adopted on June 21, 1788) began to fall into place following New Hampshire’s ratification of that instrument.

Not that much work was done at the outset. Elections were still in process, and the old “Confederation Congress” (under the old Articles of Confederation) didn’t actually cede all its power until March 4, 1789, which is why that date was “Inauguration Day” until 1937, following the ratification of the 20^th amendment, which shifted it to January 20.

In 1842, the U.S. government shifted to a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year. As the (appropriately forgotten) President John Tyler noted in his December 1843 State of the Union address: “By the act of 1842 a new arrangement of the fiscal year was made, so that it should commence on the 1^st day of July in each year.”

The July 1 fiscal year process was amended again 132 years later, when Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (ICA) in 1974.

The ICA shifted the start of the fiscal year to its current October 1 status, as the Federal Times explained in 2023, in hopes it would be easier for congressional leaders to “agree on annual federal spending plans”.

Not that Congress has actually passed appropriations by September 30 since 1996, in the same act that contained the landmark Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of that year.

Curiously, however, the federal government still uses some different calendars.

Consider the following, from Presidential Proclamation (PP) 10888, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion”, one of the first actions taken by Trump on Inauguration Day: “IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-ninth.”

The “Lord” in this instance is Jesus Christ, and the reference is a direct English translation of the Latin phrase “Anno Domini” (AD), first used in 525 by monk Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor (better known as “Dennis the Small”) who dedicated his life to calculating the passage of time since Christ’s birth.

By contrast, the years preceding Christ’s birth (by Dennis the Small’s reckoning) are denoted “BC”, “before Christ”, but that didn’t take hold until 731, when the Venerable Bede published his “Ecclesiastical History of the English People”.

Some modern scholars have been attempting to replace the “AD/BC” calculating system with one instead counting the “Common Era” (CE, which starts at Dennis the Small’s calculation of the birth of Christ) and “before the Common Era” (BCE), with limited effect.

To paraphrase Regina George (Rachel McAdams) in the 2004 comedy Mean Girls, those scholars should likely “stop trying to make ‘CE’ happen”, though when secularization is your goal, few things slow you down.

But ask the French how their “Republican calendar” worked out and, in the interim, have a great 10^th of Vendémiaire.

“The First Full Fiscal Year”

Accordingly, we are now in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, an event Hallmark hasn’t yet seen fit to promote.

We can already see some of the impact of the second Trump administration’s immigration policies from FY 2025 statistics released by CBP and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the latter the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts.

Border Patrol’s Southwest border apprehensions — the best proxy for illegal entries — were way down in FY 2025 and immigration court completions were up through the first nine months of FY 2025 while the court backlog fell over that period.

The Border Patrol data is published monthly (generally on the 15th of the next month), but EOIR’s data is cumulative, simply showing the impact for the fiscal year to date.

Consequently, while the public can get a sense of where things are going immigration-wise since the end of the last administration, the best and truest picture won’t be clear until at least the first quarter of the full first fiscal year of the new administration.

Which starts today.

If Present Trends Continue

If present trends continue, FY 2026 will likely result in the lowest number of apprehensions and the most secure border in U.S. history. It will also likely see a continued decline in the immigration courts’ collective backlog, as fewer illegal migrants enter and are placed into removal proceedings.

Both of those outcomes, however, are dependent on whether courts allow the administration to continue imposing its border restrictions, which have largely shut illegal migrants out of most forms of immigration relief and taken away their key incentives to enter illegally.

Those restrictions are based on the aforementioned PP 10888, the legality of which is currently being litigated, as I explained in August, in Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Servs. [RAICES] v. Noem.

As things now stand in RAICES, DHS can keep passing on illegal entrants’ asylum claims but must also consider whether they’ll be persecuted or tortured.

There is much in that case yet to be decided, however, while a separate, Obama-era decision (Flores v. Lynch) leaves the door open for migrant adults travelling with children in “family units” (FMUs) to come illegally and demand release in 20 days.

Thus far, family migrants (and more importantly, their smugglers) haven’t tested Trump II’s resolve on Flores, with just 514 aliens in FMUs apprehended at the Southwest border in August (up from 278 in June but well below the 15,544 who were caught in August 2024), but at the same time that lawyers litigate, smugglers gotta smuggle and at the moment they are losing their blood money.

* * *

While the forecast is good, legal storms are brewing, and whether this will end up being a happy new fiscal year for immigration enforcement remains to be seen. But like time and tide, federal fiscal years wait for no none — and the clock on FY 2026 starts today.