What demographic variables (race, ethnicity, nationality) are available in DHS/OHSS deportation and immigration enforcement data releases?
Executive summary
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) publishes deportation and immigration‑enforcement data that routinely include nationality/country of citizenship and country/region groupings, plus administrative descriptors (e.g., criminal status, encounter type); OHSS and its Key Homeland Security Metrics (KHSMs) also draw on source event records that contain additional descriptive fields but with selective public disclosure and rounding rules [1] [2] [3]. OHSS reports refer to broader “demographic characteristics” tables and asylum cohort profiles, but the public releases sometimes redact cells or withhold detail to limit disclosure, so the precise public availability of race and ethnicity as discrete fields is not consistently documented in the materials provided [4] [5] [2].
1. What the sources explicitly publish: nationality and country/region groupings
OHSS Yearbooks and data tables routinely report removals, returns and other enforcement outcomes broken out by country of nationality and by region, and these country/region breakdowns are a staple of tables such as the Yearbook removal tables and Table 42 (Noncitizen Removals by Criminal Status and Region and Country of Nationality) [6] [2]. Repatriation and KHSM data likewise derive nationality-based definitions (for example, USBP removals defined for Mexican or Canadian citizenship in some KHSM definitions), confirming that nationality/country is a central, routinely published demographic variable [7].
2. Country of birth, year of entry, and population estimates appear in specialized products
OHSS population‑estimate products and modeling releases reference country of birth and year of U.S. entry as inputs, and the Office’s unauthorized‑population estimates explicitly use country‑of‑birth data drawn from Census and other sources, indicating that country of birth/entry is tracked in OHSS work even if presented separately from enforcement tables [8]. The Yearbook collection also includes profile tables on lawful immigration categories (such as green card holders and naturalizations) that use country-of-origin and related demographic fields [4] [6].
3. “Demographic characteristics” and asylum cohort reports — suggestive but not prescriptive about race/ethnicity
OHSS Yearbooks and asylum‑processing cohort reports describe “demographic characteristics” and say they include demographic information about populations placed in program cohorts, but the snippets here do not enumerate every field; therefore the public text supports that OHSS collects and reports multiple demographic descriptors for asylum cohorts, yet it does not prove that race or standardized ethnicity labels are consistently published across enforcement tables [4] [9]. Readers should note OHSS’s habit of preserving historical terminology and table formats, which can obscure whether a given table includes race/ethnicity in a given year [10].
4. Administrative and descriptive variables in KHSM and monthly enforcement tables
The OHSS monthly Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes tables and KHSMs pull from the OHSS Statistical System of Record (SSOR) and the Persist Dataset and publish event‑level descriptors defined from source event data; example descriptors include encounter type, detention book‑ins/outs and a yes/no criminal‑conviction variable in ICE detention KHSMs [11] [3]. OHSS also applies rounding and suppression rules (rounding to nearest 10, withholding cells to limit disclosure), which affects the granularity of any demographic cross‑tabulations that are released publicly [3] [4] [2].
5. Limits, redactions and how that shapes public visibility of race/ethnicity
OHSS explicitly withholds or redacts data “to limit disclosure” in some Yearbook tables and applies rounding and other privacy/validation procedures in KHSMs, meaning that even when detailed demographic fields exist in the SSOR, they may not appear in public tables or may be aggregated [4] [5] [3]. The available documentation shows clear evidence for nationality/country, region, country of birth and administrative descriptors, but the supplied sources do not provide a definitive, itemized list of a standardized “race” or “Hispanic/non‑Hispanic ethnicity” field consistently published across all enforcement releases — OHSS collects many demographic fields, but public disclosure varies by table and year [1] [4] [11].
6. Bottom line for researchers and journalists
Official OHSS enforcement releases reliably provide nationality/country and region identifiers and many administrative descriptors (encounter, detention, criminal status), and other demographic elements (country of birth, cohort demographic summaries) appear in specialized products; however, public disclosure practices, cell suppression and rounding mean that race and ethnicity are not uniformly visible across all public enforcement tables based on the materials provided here, and investigators should consult the specific Yearbook table, KHSM product or monthly table page to see which demographic fields are published for a given year or dataset [6] [3] [2].