What is the historical annual number of ICE arrests and deportations since 2010?

1. What data are available and where to find the annual counts

ICE publishes Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) statistics and periodic detention/removal tables on its site (arrests, removals, book‑ins) and DHS’s Office of Health and Safety Statistics (OHSS) maintains the Persist dataset with monthly tables that can be aggregated into annual totals ^{[1] [3]}. For researchers who want person‑level, multi‑year series, the Deportation Data Project has curated and released ICE’s encounter records (including arrests, detainers, detentions and removals) covering long periods and extending through Oct. 15, 2025 in its most recent release ^[2].

2. Why you see different annual numbers across sources

Different counts exist because sources use different definitions and scopes: ICE’s public “arrest” counts often reflect ERO administrative arrests that led to ICE book‑ins, not every encounter; DHS OHSS compiles operational reports into the Persist dataset with its own inclusion rules; the Deportation Data Project provides raw encounter records produced to researchers under FOIA, enabling different aggregation choices ^{[1] [3] [2]}. GAO also found ICE’s public reports undercount detentions because ICE excludes people first booked into temporary facilities before transfer, which affects annual tallies ^[4].

3. Historical patterns and notable shifts (2010s → 2022 and beyond)

Independent reviews and GAO’s analysis show arrests and removals moved in different directions in recent years: GAO reports arrests declined after 2019 then rose by 2022 (133,541 arrests in 2019 to 154,204 in 2022) while removals dropped sharply from 276,122 in 2019 to 81,547 in 2022 ^[4]. Migration Policy Institute summarized broader context — ICE controls interior enforcement that substantially shapes deportations — and cited a 2020–24 average of roughly 352,000 deportations per year reported in DHS summaries, indicating that annual removals vary with policy and operational changes ^[5].

4. How journalists and analysts reconstruct annual series

Newsrooms and researchers scrape and aggregate ICE and DHS releases, or analyze the Deportation Data Project person‑level files. The Guardian and others have tracked biweekly ICE detention releases to compute arrests and removals for 2025; the Deportation Data Project’s FOIA‑obtained files permit constructing consistent annual series back to 2011 for deeper trend work ^{[6] [2]}.

5. Limitations, disagreements and what they mean for any “official” annual count

Available sources disagree on totals because of methodological choices and incomplete public reporting: ICE’s public tables omit some initial bookings (a GAO finding) and ICE reports arrests conditioned on resulting in detention, potentially undercounting arrests that did not become book‑ins ^{[4] [6]}. The Deportation Data Project includes more granular records but requires careful cleaning; different analysts (e.g., GAO, Migration Policy Institute, media outlets) derive different headline annual numbers from overlapping but not identical datasets ^{[2] [5] [4]}.

6. Practical next steps to get a year‑by‑year table you can trust

If you need a historical annual table since 2010: use DHS OHSS Persist tables and ICE ERO annual tables for official removals/book‑ins ^{[1] [3]}; cross‑check and fill gaps with the Deportation Data Project person‑level files ^[2]; consult GAO and Migration Policy Institute summaries for methodological cautions and previously computed aggregates ^{[4] [5]}. For transparency, publish your definition (what you count as an “arrest” or a “deportation”), cite the dataset versions, and note known undercounts GAO identified ^[4].

Limitations: This briefing uses only the provided sources and therefore cannot list a single definitive table of annual arrests and deportations for every year since 2010 here; to produce the year‑by‑year numbers you asked for I can extract and tabulate them next using the OHSS/Persist tables and the Deportation Data Project files cited above if you want ^{[2] [3] [1]}.