How many lawful permanent residents (green card holders) were deported in 2025 and what were the main legal grounds?
This fact-check may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information.
Executive summary
Public sources do not provide a definitive, public count of how many lawful permanent residents (green card holders) were specifically deported in 2025; federal agencies released competing totals for overall removals—DHS press statements claim hundreds of thousands removed while independent analysts and ICE statistics produce lower but still large estimates—yet none publish a clear breakdown isolating lawful permanent residents [1] [2] [3] [4]. The main legal grounds cited across government and reporting for deporting lawful permanent residents are criminal convictions (including aggravated felonies), immigration fraud and misrepresentation, prior removals or unlawful reentry, national-security-related grounds, and abandonment of residence, but available public data do not show how many LPR removals fell into each category [4] [5] [6].
1. The headline numbers: conflicting tallies and who is speaking
DHS public communications in 2025 framed removals in six‑figure terms—one DHS release asserted “more than 605,000 deportations” since the start of the 2025 administration (a December 2025 statement) and earlier DHS releases claimed figures like “more than 527,000” removals as of late October 2025—both are agency tallies that mix removals, voluntary departures, and other exits in the administration’s messaging [1] [2]. Independent analysts produced different totals: the Migration Policy Institute’s synthesis of publicly available records estimated ICE conducted about 340,000 deportations in fiscal year 2025, a figure that explicitly includes noncitizens with formal removal orders and voluntary departures from detention [3]. ICE’s own enforcement statistics characterize categories of those removed but do not, in the public materials provided here, produce a clean LPR‑only removal total [4].
2. Why the numbers differ: definitions, timing, and reporting lag
Part of the divergence stems from differences in definitions (DHS public affairs counts framed as “removed” or “left,” and sometimes include voluntary self‑deportations), reporting windows (administration statements use calendar dates since Jan 20, 2025 while MPI and ICE cite fiscal year totals), and the well‑documented processing lag in official monthly and yearbook tables that DHS updates after data review—OHSS notes monthly tables are published about 45 days after the reporting period, and the Yearbook aggregates categories over fiscal years [7] [8] [3]. That lag and aggregation make it difficult to extract timely, auditable counts for particular legal statuses such as lawful permanent residents from the public dashboards and press releases alone [7] [8].
3. What the public record says about lawful permanent residents specifically
Reporting and advocacy summaries repeatedly note an absence of a publicly available, authoritative breakdown that separates green card holders from other noncitizens in removal tallies; recent secondary reporting explicitly states DHS’s overall deportation totals do not come with a comprehensive breakdown for legal immigrants versus unauthorized migrants [5]. Immigration court and ERO materials discuss grounds and categories for removal and show large volumes of removal orders issued in 2025, but these sources do not translate into a single, confirmed count of LPRs removed during 2025 in the materials provided here [9] [4].
4. The legal grounds used to remove lawful permanent residents
When green card holders are removed, the legal bases most frequently cited across agency guidance and reporting are criminal convictions—particularly aggravated felonies or crimes involving moral turpitude—fraud or misrepresentation in the immigration process, national‑security or terrorism grounds, illegal reentry after prior removal, and abandonment of residency (including signing Form I‑407 in some pressured contexts); ICE and other enforcement materials list those categories as routine grounds for enforcement actions [4] [5] [6]. Immigration court data and watchdog summaries show immigration judges issued large numbers of removal orders in 2025 and that a substantial share of completed cases resulted in orders of removal, but these records again are not presented in the available sources as a filtered count of LPR removals by ground [9] [3].
5. Political framing, transparency gaps, and why it matters
DHS and White House statements emphasize enforcement successes and prioritize characterizing removals as targeting “criminal illegal aliens,” language that serves political objectives and can obscure nuance about legal status and due process [1] [2] [10]. Independent analyses and media investigations have highlighted tactical shifts—more community arrests and interior enforcement—and watchdogs note that public dashboards and press releases lack the granular status and category breakdowns researchers and defense counsel need to assess the true scale of LPR removals [11] [3] [5]. Given these documentation gaps in the provided public record, a precise, auditable count of how many lawful permanent residents were deported in 2025 cannot be extracted from the materials available here; the best that can be reported is that overall removals numbered in the hundreds of thousands by multiple counts, while LPR‑specific totals were not published in the cited sources [1] [2] [3] [5].