How many violent criminals were deported by ICE in 2025 and compare this to every other year in history. Use data from DHS.gov and ICE.gov.
Executive summary
Federal sources do not publish a clean, single-line tally of “violent criminals deported by ICE in 2025,” so any precise headcount requires combining partial official releases and secondary estimates: the Migration Policy Institute estimated roughly 340,000 total deportations in FY2025 (used as a working baseline) and contemporaneous government and independent reporting places the share of deported people with violent convictions between under 5% (by October 2025) and roughly 7–10% earlier in recent comparisons, yielding a plausible 2025 range of roughly 17,000–34,000 violent-conviction removals depending on which percentage is applied [1] [2] [3]. DHS and ICE statements also offer competing aggregate claims about removals that are not reconcilable into a single violent-criminal count from the documents released publicly [4] [5].
1. The data gap: why ICE/DHS don’t give a simple 2025 violent‑deportee number
ICE’s public statistics pages and DHS’s OHSS monthly tables are the official repositories for enforcement and removals data, but the publicly posted tables and press releases do not present a single year-end figure explicitly labelled “violent criminals deported in 2025,” and the published datasets are updated in different formats and cadences that complicate year‑to‑year aggregation (ICE statistical overview; OHSS monthly tables) [6] [7]. Internal and FOIA‑released datasets assembled by researchers (for example the Deportation Data Project) extend coverage through October 2025 and have been the basis for outside analyses, but those releases still require filtering and re‑coding to isolate “violent” convictions and do not constitute a contiguous, easily-queried DHS/ICE dataset for the full calendar or fiscal year [8].
2. Best available estimate for 2025 and the range around it
The Migration Policy Institute’s working estimate of about 340,000 deportations in FY2025 provides a pragmatic denominator for estimating violent‑conviction removals when a precise official figure is absent [1]. Applying contemporaneous percentage measures from government and independent analyses—estimates that the share of deported/ detained people with violent convictions fell to roughly 7% (in mid‑2025 comparisons) and to under 5% by October—produces a 2025 estimate band: 340,000 × 7% ≈ 23,800 and 340,000 × 5% ≈ 17,000 [3] [2]. These calculations are explicitly contingent on using MPI’s deportation total and the cited percentage ranges; researchers using different denominators or a different interpretation of “violent conviction” will produce different counts [1] [3] [2].
3. Why rival official statements muddy the total
DHS and ICE have also issued high‑level statements about removals that are not numerically consistent with independent tabulations—DHS touting “more than 670,000 removals” in a public recap for the administration’s first year, for example—making reconciliation difficult without the underlying tables and definitions [4]. ICE’s operational pages confirm that their published worksheets and tables can fluctuate until datasets are locked at the fiscal‑year close and that different reporting streams (ERO removals, CBP expulsions, voluntary departures, Title 42 expulsions) are sometimes aggregated differently, which helps explain why public messaging and independent counts diverge [9] [6].
4. Comparison to “every other year in history”: what the sources permit and where they don’t
The sources provided and publicly available ICE/DHS pages allow researchers to construct long‑run time series if they extract and harmonize the underlying tables (ICE historical statistics, OHSS Persist dataset), but the specific, single‑number comparison asked for—“violent criminals deported by ICE in 2025 and compare this to every other year in history”—cannot be fully fulfilled from the cited documents without additional data processing beyond these releases; the datasets exist in part but were not supplied in a harmonized, year‑by‑year violent‑conviction series in the materials reviewed here [6] [8] [7]. Independent analyses do offer context: during the Biden period the share of deported individuals convicted of violent crimes was reported higher (around 9–10% in some snapshots), while in 2025 observers document a falling share under the new enforcement posture (single‑year comparisons in 2025 show the violent share declining to under 5–7% by mid/late year), which implies fewer violent‑conviction removals in 2025 as a share of total removals than in recent prior snapshots—but an exact year‑by‑year numeric table from DHS/ICE is not present in the provided reporting to demonstrate an exhaustive historical comparison [3] [2] [1].