Which countries had the most legal immigrants deported by ICE in 2024?
Executive summary
The bulk of ICE removals and arrests in fiscal year 2024 were concentrated among nationals of Mexico and northern Central American countries, with Mexico far outpacing other nationalities in ICE statistics and media visualizations of the agency’s data [1] [2]. Official ICE dashboards and secondary analyses confirm a large-scale operation—hundreds of thousands of deportations across 192 countries in FY2024—though the datasets do not cleanly map onto the phrase “legal immigrants” as commonly used [3] [4] [5].
1. The headline totals: how many deportations in 2024 and where they went
ICE and contemporaneous reporting put total removals and returns in fiscal year 2024 at a scale not seen in a decade, with media accounts citing more than 271,000 deportations agency-wide in FY2024 [5], and ICE itself reporting massive quarterly removal tallies such as nearly 68,000 removals in one quarter [6]; ICE’s public dashboards now span arrests, detentions and removals by country through December 31, 2024 [3].
2. Countries at the top of the list
Visualizations and ICE-derived datasets published in late 2024 and early 2025 show Mexico as the largest single country of citizenship among those arrested or removed, by a wide margin, followed by Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and Colombia in the top ranks for ICE arrests and removals in FY2024—Newsweek’s map of ICE arrests listed Mexico (about 69,364 arrests), Guatemala , Honduras , Ecuador and Colombia for the October 2023–September 2024 period [1] [2].
3. What “legal immigrants” means — and why the available data don’t answer that precisely
The sources catalog removals, returns and arrests by country of citizenship and criminality categories but do not clearly publish a public breakdown labeled “legal immigrants” versus unauthorized migrants or lawful permanent residents in the FY2024 removals dashboards cited here, and secondary reporting warns that many removals involve people apprehended at the border rather than interior arrests [3] [4] [5]; therefore the available evidence shows which countries’ nationals were most often removed but does not reliably indicate how many of those removed were lawful permanent residents or otherwise “legal” immigrants under U.S. immigration law [3] [4].
4. Structural context and reporting caveats
Analysts emphasize that removals in FY2024 were geographically broad—ICE reported removals and returns to some 192 countries—and that removals include both expedited border removals and interior ICE actions, while the agency’s dashboards separate categories of criminality and arresting agency but can still conflate different procedural pathways [4] [3]. Migration Policy notes a long-standing concentration of interior removals among Mexicans (about 63 percent) and northern Central Americans (about 24 percent) in 2021–24, a pattern reinforced in FY2024 data [4]. Independent commentators and watchdogs further caution that public tallies can vary by methodology and as‑of dates across ICE, OHSS and advocacy datasets [7] [8].
5. The bottom line
Based on ICE’s public dashboards and contemporaneous reporting, the countries whose nationals experienced the largest numbers of ICE arrests and removals in FY2024 were overwhelmingly Mexico and the northern Central American states (Guatemala and Honduras), with Ecuador and Colombia also appearing among the top origins in ICE-derived visualizations; however, the available sources do not disaggregate removals by “legal immigrant” status in a way that lets one say which countries had the most lawful permanent residents deported in 2024 [1] [2] [4] [3] [5].