The numbers vary according to who gives them….
The government says a ‘ALL time High’….
Probably far from that…
The Trump Admin figures?
The Trump administration is asking the public to trust its math on what it promised would be the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.
Why it matters: The Department of Homeland Security has used a highly unorthodox approach to reach its stunning figure of 2 million undocumented immigrants “removed or self-deported” since Inauguration Day.
- “The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a Sept. 23 press release.
- 80% of that total (1.6 million) is on the “self-deported” side, based on government survey data that experts warn should be viewed with skepticism.
Zoom in: “Remember what matters are ICE removals and deportations, way more than these other funny numbers,” said Trump supporter Mike Howell, who is president of the Oversight Project, formerly part of the Heritage Foundation.
- “I see the 1.6 million as a pretty shaky estimate, and one that could be explained away by fewer immigrants feeling comfortable answering a government survey,” said Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, migration-focused think tank.
Between the lines: DHS cites an analysis of government survey data, known as the Current Population Survey (CPS), which the Census Bureau saysshouldn’t be used to determine the size of the foreign-born population as it’s based on a sample size of roughly 60,000 households.
- The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think-tank that published the analysis in August, noted “important caveats” — including an expected reluctance for immigrants to respond to the survey or admit they’re foreign-born. It also noted a lack of other data from the administration to support the estimate.
- The CIS authors called the numbers “preliminary,” but co-author Steven Camarota said that he thinks, at a minimum, it’s accurately showing a declining trend in the population.
- “We can’t say 100% but boy, it’s the best data we have, and I think it’s telling us that the decline is very large and real,” Caramota said.
Zoom out: DHS has stopped regularly publishing statistics on its website that previous administrations used to share data on deportations.
- Typically deportations are measured by the number of “removals” by ICE, which manages the immigrant detention system and facilitates travel, and faster “returns” at the border by Customs and Border Protection.
- In fiscal 2024, DHS carried out almost 330,000 removals and 447,600 returns, according to the DHS statistics database. But the number of attempted border crossings was much higher in 2024 than in recent months, juicing the number of returns.
- Voluntary survey data on the foreign-born population isn’t usually a metric for deportations, and isn’t included in the past statistics database….
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Largest in History?
The Republican administration has expelled nearly 170,000 people so far in 2025, a figure that falls far short of its latest goal of one million in the first year …
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To successfully expel so many people from the country, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) machinery must not only be well-oiled, but also expanded at every stage of the deportation effort: arrests, detentions in immigration centers and prisons, and repatriation flights or flights to third countries. The new budget that ICE received as part of the mega-law passed in July will allow for an unprecedented agency expansion in a bid to reach those goals.
For now, however, the increase in ICE activities, while significant and firmly establishing a climate of fear among migrant communities across the country, has not reached the levels the Administration has set for itself, according to reports and figures released by the agency itself.
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, there was talk of achieving 1,000 daily apprehensions, a significant increase from the average of around 300 at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency. In May, following a meeting in which Deputy Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor Stephen Miller lashed out at immigration officials for the low numbers of apprehensions and deportations, the numbers suddenly spiked as information circulated that the new goal was 3,000 arrests per day. Although ICE arrests increased from around 18,000 in April to 23,000 in May and 31,500 in June, the 3,000 daily figure has never been reached, and over the summer, apprehensions stabilized again around 30,000 a month….
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The final step is the removal of as many undocumented migrants as possible from the country. At the time of Trump’s inauguration, around 13,000 people were being deported each month; now, the figure is approaching 30,000, after nine months of sustained increases. In total, according to official ICE data, 168,841 people were deported between January and August. This is still far from “the largest deportation in history,” and even from the more realistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.
Although the Trump administration has cited higher figures without providing evidence, its data includes all people who have voluntarily left the country in response to the immigration climate created by the president, including people with green cards. Still, the total number of deportations, whether ordinary or “self-deportations,” as the administration has chosen to call them, is still far from “the highest in history.”…
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