Deportations near 1 million under Trump but fall short of White House target
Two new analyses find removals are well above the Biden years but below the administration's goal, with most still tied to border arrests.
WASHINGTON — Deportations have climbed sharply during President Donald Trump’s second term but remain well short of the administration’s promise of 1 million a year, according to two new analyses released this week.
About 660,000 people were deported during the most recent fiscal year, according to a report from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. That is a 26% increase over the yearly average from 2021 to 2024 under President Joe Biden, The Associated Press reported.
The total is far below the 1.86 million deportations recorded in 2000 under President Bill Clinton, when enforcement ramped up under a sweeping 1996 immigration law.
Border arrests still drive the numbers
The institute found that people first stopped at the border still make up most deportations. From Jan. 20, 2025, through July 31, 2026, 69% of all deportations were of people initially intercepted at the border.
The administration promised 1 million deportations a year when it secured billions of dollars in new enforcement funding from Congress last year.
A separate analysis by Marc Rosenblum, a former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security, tallied about 980,000 deportations during the second Trump administration through July 31, a period of about 18 months, Stateline reported. That count includes people who agreed to leave voluntarily after being arrested.
Rosenblum’s count may not include some people who came forward on their own to claim financial help to leave the country through the administration’s Project Homecoming program. Even so, the level of deportations is sharply higher than during the Biden and first Trump administrations, though well below the levels of the early 2000s, his analysis found.
Criminal records
Rosenblum found that 20% of those removed had a criminal conviction. Among people who had been in the United States for at least two years, the share was 28%.
Even among those with convictions, the records were more likely to involve immigration or traffic offenses than violent or other serious crimes, he said.
Administration officials have said they are prioritizing what they call “the worst of the worst.” Homeland Security officials have pointed to arrests of people with convictions for murder, sexual assault and drug trafficking.
Self-deportations
The number of immigrants leaving on their own is disputed. DHS has claimed more than 2.2 million “self-deportations,” apparently based on survey data showing a decline in the immigrant population.
Rosenblum estimated that between 310,000 and 1.5 million immigrants who had been in the country at least a year left on their own, not counting those with formal agreements to leave.
More to come
White House border czar Tom Homan has said deportations will keep rising. He predicted that September would bring the highest monthly total in the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and said removals would be even higher in 2027.
Local law enforcement cooperation has grown rapidly. More than 1,850 state and local agencies had joined ICE’s 287(g) task force program as of Oct. 1, allowing deputized officers to carry out immigration enforcement during routine policing.
Border crossings, meanwhile, have fallen to historic lows. Border Patrol made about 98,700 arrests at the southern border in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the fewest on record, which means fewer new cases are feeding into the deportation pipeline.
Some Republicans have urged a narrower focus. Polls this year have found strong support for securing the border alongside majority support for letting longtime workers without criminal records gain legal status.
