How many illegal immigrants voluntarily left us in 2025
Executive summary
The best contemporaneous accounting comes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which reported at multiple points in 2025 that roughly between 1.6 million and 1.9 million people “voluntarily self-deported” or “self-deported” during that year; DHS used the 1.6 million figure in August and a 1.9 million estimate in December 2025 [1] [2] [3] [4]. Independent researchers and news organizations note the figure is an administrative estimate that rests on shifting definitions (voluntary departure, self-deportation, final removal orders) and imperfect measurement, so the plausible range for 2025 voluntary departures reported publicly is about 1.6–1.9 million [1] [2] [5].
1. DHS’s public tallies: repeated announcements and rising totals
DHS press releases in 2025 repeatedly announced multi‑million tallies of people who “left” the United States, with an August statement from Secretary Kristi Noem citing a decline of approximately 1.6 million “illegal aliens” and later December releases and statements pushing DHS’s cumulative number of self‑deportations to about 1.9 million [3] [1] [2] [4]. Those DHS communications also packaged self‑deportations together with formal deportations to report that “more than 2.5 million” people had left the country in 2025, with DHS attributing roughly 600–622 thousand to formal removals and the rest to voluntary departures [2] [4] [1].
2. What DHS means by “self‑deported” and why the term matters
DHS and ICE use administrative categories—“voluntary departure,” “self‑deportation” logged via apps like CBP Home, and other recorded departures—to produce the self‑deportation totals, but those labels mix departures compelled by enforcement pressure with truly voluntary returns and sometimes departures recorded after administrative hearings or detention [1] [6]. Reporting and FOIA analyses show ICE records growing numbers of departures through July 2025 and an expanded apparatus (apps, campaigns, incentives) to encourage people to leave, but they do not fully disentangle coercion, formal voluntary‑departure orders, or people who left after receiving final removal orders [6] [1].
3. Independent estimates, court data and population measures complicate the picture
Independent analysts and migration researchers present different counts for formal removals and caution that the DHS aggregate overstates a clean category called “voluntary” departures; for example, Migration Policy Institute estimates about 340,000 deportations by ICE in FY2025 (a different metric than DHS’s total removals) and immigration courts issued hundreds of thousands of removal or voluntary departure orders through the year [5] [7]. Separately, Census and Pew analyses observed a fall in the foreign‑born population of roughly 1.5 million by mid‑2025, which likely reflects a combination of increased removals, voluntary exits, and other demographic shifts rather than a one‑to‑one match with DHS’s self‑deportation count [8].
4. Journalistic and academic caveats about DHS’s arithmetic
News organizations and policy centers have flagged that DHS’s headline numbers serve a political narrative and rest on administrative reporting choices: officials counted many kinds of departures and attributed most of the decline in unauthorized population to “self‑deportation,” while other analysts note the difficulty of tracking undocumented movement and the overlap between expedited removals, voluntary departures from detained populations, and people leaving proactively under pressure [9] [6] [5]. The Guardian and Reuters reporting also highlights that DHS/ICE detention and deportation tallies vary from independent trackers, underscoring that precise attribution of “voluntary” versus forced exits is disputed [10] [11].
5. Bottom line and confidence statement
Based on DHS’s own public releases and the contemporaneous reporting assembled here, the count most consistently cited for 2025 voluntary departures is in the 1.6 million (mid‑year) to 1.9 million (end‑of‑year) range; DHS characterized those as “self‑deportations” while separately counting roughly 600–622 thousand formal deportations [3] [1] [2] [4]. Confidence in the headline range is moderate for describing what DHS reported, but lower for interpreting those numbers as a clean measure of freely chosen departures because of definitional mixing, administrative incentives to publicize large totals, and independent estimates that use different methods [6] [5] [9].