Hi readers. As of tomorrow, Donald Trump has been president for 100 days. If it feels like longer, it’s because the way we perceive time depends on the number of new things we experience – our brains take longer to process novelty than repetition, and whatever your political persuasion you must admit this administration has been novel so far.

For this week’s fact-check, we’ll take a look back over the past 99 days and try to see whether the president has fulfilled any of his promises to the people who voted for him.

Step 1: Try to understand what Trump voters expected. This is not easy. About 63 million people in America voted for him, and their reasons can’t accurately be captured by simple polling percentages.

However, reading through many of the interviews that were conducted with Trump voters in the days after the election, several themes emerge.

Immigration repeatedly appears to have been a motivation. For example Heather, 43, said she wanted “a halt to the preference of immigrants before citizens”, while another Trump voter anonymously explained: “The primary policy that I was behind was his immigration policies.”

There are two other elements of democracy which are often mentioned by Trump voters. First, the media – more specifically described as “the mainstream media” or “the liberal media” – coming under criticism for being biased. Second, the federal government, which is described as corrupt and inefficient. As a candidate, Trump suggested voters were right to distrust both the “lying” media and “the swamp” of government – leaving few other places for voters to channel their faith but himself.

So has President Trump kept the media and government in line?

Step 2: Trump made campaign pledges to “stop illegal immigration, deport all criminal aliens” and also remove all existing undocumented immigrants from the country. Big promises. To figure out if they’ve been kept, we need to look up immigration statistics.

I Googled “immigrant arrest statistics” and filtered for results published in the past month. A quick scan of the first few pages showed that there aren’t any results published by federal authorities, so I had to go for a plan B and clicked on an article by the Washington Post. Their journalists requested numbers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), so it’s the next best thing to a direct source.

Ice numbers suggest that Trump is attempting to fulfill his promise. From 20 January to 13 March, arrests of immigrants with no criminal record were twice as high as what they were over the same period in 2016.

But the figures are still lower than they were in the first few months of 2014, when Barack Obama was in office. And although arrests have risen under Trump, deportations have remained pretty steady, falling by just 1.2%. It’s also worth noting that the the arrests make up a small share of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US (by the way, that number hasn’t risen for the past eight years). Perhaps Trump voters feel they can be patient for more to follow.

Step 3: As a candidate, Trump responded to voter concerns about government inefficiency by promising to enact a “a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated”. I simply Googled the claim word for word with quote marks around it (that way the search engine only shows results that contain that exact phrase), as well as “promises kept”. I landed at Politifact.

The page explains that on 31 January, Trump signed an executive order with wording that was pretty similar to his initial promise.

To see whether the executive order has had any impact, I searched for “new federal regulations per month” and landed here, the Regulatory Studies Center at the George Washington University. They have really fascinating data on this subject (I had no idea that the Code of Federal Regulations has grown from 71,224 pages in 1975 to 178,277 at the end of 2015), but unfortunately they don’t have any new data for 2017. Still though, I’ll be keeping an eye on this page in the future.

Step 4: To find out what Trump has done for voters who were frustrated with the media, I remembered an email I received yesterday from the Index on Censorship, a nonprofit campaign group on free expression. (I know it’s a bit of a cheat, but a search for “press freedom under Trump” would have gotten you to a similar place.)

The group has just published a study that reviewed over 150 media freedom incidents that happened in the US between 30 June 2016 and 28 February 2017. That number isn’t supposed to represent every incident that took place, but still. The report summary says:

Examples of attacks on the press include the arrest and detention of journalists covering protests, online harassment, physical assaults, and the branding of factual reporting by media outlets that high-ranking officials – including the President – do not like as ‘fake news’.

For many journalists, this is deeply worrying. But for some Trump voters who didn’t trust the “dishonest” media in the first place, maybe it’s not a big deal.

On these three promises, it looks like Trump has at least tried to keep his word. I’m reminded yet again of writer Masha Gessen’s survival guide which she published a couple of days after the last US election: “Rule #1: Believe the autocrat.”

Would you like to see something fact-checked? Send me your questions! mona.chalabi@theguardian.com / @MonaChalabi