There are two stories that could be told about the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. One story is that the White House has pursued a massive reorientation of the federal government to deport as many people as possible as quickly as possible in an effort involving not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) but a host of non-immigration law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the IRS,
These agencies have descended in force on cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Charlotte, North Carolina, executing huge and aggressive enforcement raids. The president campaigned on deporting millions of people, and he’s doing just that with the help of White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, who’s reportedly overseeing the operation.
There’s a lot of truth to that story, particularly the diversion of a large portion of federal law enforcement resources away from investigating and prosecuting violent criminals, gangs, and human traffickers to helping ICE and CBP round people up.
But the other story is how difficult it is to conduct deportations on a massive scale, even if the approach of targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal illegal immigrants has been largely abandoned in favor of less targeted raids and enforcement. The deportation campaign has featured disturbing and illegal tactics, abuses of power, and masked federal agents operating with virtual impunity, and it will likely result in historically high numbers of removals.
But over the last 11 months, the administration has struggled to hit the numbers Trump and Miller promised during the campaign. Trump said in his inaugural address that his administration would remove “millions and millions of criminal aliens” from the country, and the White House in May set a minimum goal of 3,000 daily ICE arrests, a number intended to result in 1 million-plus deportations per year. The administration later tried to walk back the apparent quota after it was scrutinized in court.
In response to the lower-than-promised results, the administration has fallen back on a familiar tactic: If the numbers don’t fit the narrative, simply change the numbers. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has cut off the regular publication of deportation and removal numbers and data breakdowns, opting instead to issue press releases of topline deportations with no explanation of how the totals were calculated.
Playing fast and loose with immigration enforcement data is not unique to this administration. The Obama administration was scrutinized for equating border removals with ICE deportations from the interior of the country. In April, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the Biden administration had been “cooking the books” regarding removals and deportations at the border.
But the Trump DHS isn’t just fiddling with the data or putting spin on the results; it simply isn’t releasing the numbers. Since the administration took office in January, DHS has not published monthly immigration enforcement tables, nor has ICE updated its data portal on arrests, detentions, and removals—datasets that were updated quarterly during the first Trump administration.
Instead, the administration has published topline numbers with no breakdown of the data or explanation of how the numbers were calculated. DHS has focused on two broad categories: deportations and “self-deportations,” or migrants leaving the country on their own. In a late October press release, the department claimed that it had deported 527,000 people and that an additional 1.6 million illegal immigrants had “voluntarily self-deported” as a result of the aggressive enforcement posture. Noem and senior DHS officials have combined the two numbers to claim that the administration’s efforts have resulted in more than 2 million illegal immigrants exiting the country.
DHS has not explained what they are counting as deportations in the 527,000 number, and the agency did not respond to The Dispatch’s request for clarification. By contrast, DHS has continued the prompt release of data on the monthly CBP encounters at the border. Ironically, the precipitous drop in such encounters has resulted in fewer removals from the border, numbers that helped push up the deportation totals during the Biden administration.
Immigration analysts The Dispatch spoke with say the deportation topline numbers make sense only if DHS is doing exactly what it accused previous administrations of doing: juicing the numbers by including data that have not been previously understood as reflecting deportations.
“That number they’ve put forward seems to be a mishmash of different kinds of removals and turn-aways, not all of which are traditional deportations,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration think tank. Combining CBP returns at or near the border with ICE removals to get to an overall deportation number is consistent with how recent administrations have presented totals.
But Gupta said that DHS appears to be including metrics like the number of people that CBP’s Office of Field Operations turns away or deems inadmissible at airports and seaports (these numbers include people who are trying to enter legally but have some issue with their paperwork or visas that results in them being deemed inadmissible). The department has also reportedly been including interdictions by the Coast Guard of people before they ever reach the U.S. and the relatively small number of people who have voluntarily departed via the CBP Home app—a new program offering free travel and money to undocumented immigrants leaving the country.
“It’s inconceivable that there’s been that many deportations, based on the number of arrests, based on the number of people entering ICE detention,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, told The Dispatch. “Anyone who’s looked at these numbers in the past assesses that you are only getting to 500,000 [deportations] if you’re including every single person who was turned back at the border from an airport, a seaport.”
“We’ve never had any administration before this one categorize these visa holders who get turned away and go back on their own as deportations,” he added.
A fuzzy data picture has emerged from anonymous sources within DHS and the agency’s sporadic responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from news outlets and researchers. The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE deportations during the first seven months of the year totaled 158,000, based on an analysis of FOIA data. The Journal also cited an unnamed source putting the ICE deportations through early September at around 220,000, a figure well below the overall 400,000 deportation number DHS released publicly at the time.
The analysts The Dispatch spoke with put the the ballpark estimate of total ICE and CBP deportations through early fall in the 300,000 range, based on their analyses and the piecemeal data releases, though they emphasized the lack of clear data or explanations from DHS make the estimates rough.
Still, the bulk of the 2 million-plus number that DHS has been touting comes from the 1.6 million so-called “self-deportations,” a metric that previous administrations have not used. The source of the number seems to be an August report released by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that advocates for restrictionist immigration policies and supports wide-scale deportation. DHS used a chart from the report when it put out the 1.6 million number in an August press release.
Steven Camarota, director of research at CIS, co-authored the report, which analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey showing a decline in the foreign-born population from January to July of this year. The survey doesn’t distinguish between undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants, but Camarota used the data to make a preliminary estimate of a 1.6 million decline in the illegal immigrant population over that period. Other analysts have questioned the reliability of such an estimate, suggesting that the administration’s deportation campaign could have contributed to a drop in illegal immigrants’ response to the survey.
Regardless, the administration’s stacking of the claimed 527,000 deportations on top of the 1.6 million “self-deportations” doesn’t add up since the 1.6 million is an estimate of the overall decline in the illegal immigrant population, which would already include people removed by the administration, at least through July. “They try to say the 1.6 million is the number who’ve left on their own, plus they’ve removed 527,000,” Camarota told The Dispatch. “I don’t understand that.”
“My number is the net change in the size of the illegal population based on an analysis of the monthly current population survey done by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure the labor force, but it captures pretty much the whole population,” he explained. “It’s a net number, so it would include all the people who go home on their own, and that seems to be the biggest thing that’s happened, but it also includes people who have been removed from the country.” Camarota added that the estimate would also include the small portion of the illegal population that has either died over the time period or secured legal status.
The administration is continuing to ramp up its enforcement efforts, expand detention capacity, and hire a huge number of additional ICE officers. If the campaign continues unabated, new records of annual deportations will likely be set. But for now, it’s still a far cry from the millions officials have claimed.
“It’s not an accurate way of thinking about whether they’re meeting the promise that they made,” Bier said of how DHS is using the data. “It’s a way to get the highest number you possibly can to sell to your boss that you’re going to get millions and millions of deportations by the end of four years. And by that measure, they can at least get to two [million], which would enable them to use the plural of millions.”
