Where can I find ICE or DHS annual reports with deportation breakdowns by conviction type?
Executive summary
The authoritative sources for annual deportation statistics and breakdowns by criminal-conviction type are the Department of Homeland Security’s statistical arm (Office of Homeland Security Statistics, OHSS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publications; OHSS publishes Yearbook tables and an Immigration Enforcement Actions Annual Flow Report that include conviction-status and crime-category tables, while ICE posts enforcement statistics and summaries on its statistics page (OHSS Yearbook/Table 39, Table 41, Annual Flow Report; ICE statistics) [1][2][3][4].
1. Where the official tables live and what they contain
DHS’s OHSS hosts the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics and specific tables that list removals and returns by criminal status and offense category — for example, Table 39 (removals/returns across years) and Table 41 (removals by criminal status and region) — and these Yearbook tables are the most direct place to get historical, table-form breakdowns by conviction type [1][2]. OHSS also publishes an Immigration Enforcement Actions Annual Flow Report that synthesizes CBP and ICE case records into annual flow statistics, and that report explicitly includes counts of persons removed who had prior criminal convictions [3][5].
2. ICE’s statistics page and operational summaries
ICE’s own Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) statistics page publishes removals, arrests, and broad categorizations of enforcement priorities; ICE’s site is useful for contemporary enforcement tallies and priority-category descriptions (e.g., removals of those charged with or convicted of crimes, repeat re‑entrants, national-security targets), but it often summarizes categories rather than supplying the full disaggregated tables that OHSS provides [4].
3. Monthly and near‑real‑time data sources
For more frequent updates, OHSS’s monthly immigration enforcement tables draw from the Persist dataset and report encounters, arrests, detentions, removals and returns on a monthly cadence; these monthly tables are standardized and deduplicated by OHSS statisticians and can show recent trends before the Yearbook cycle closes [6]. The monthly tables are best for tracking short‑term changes, while the Yearbook and Annual Flow Report are the canonical annual sources [6][3].
4. Caveats, gaps, and why numbers can differ
Careful readers should note methodological caveats that affect “conviction” breakdowns: OHSS and ICE disclaimers warn that CBP removal records often do not indicate whether an individual had a criminal conviction, so some criminal-removal counts exclude CBP removals or treat them separately; the OIS/Annual Flow documentation explicitly notes that removals by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are not always identified as criminal in CBP’s dataset and are thus excluded from some criminal‑conviction tabulations [5]. OHSS’s KHSM and repatriation tables also reveal that the statistical variable for prior conviction is a Yes/No field, which limits granularity where offense-type coding is incomplete [7].
5. Third‑party aggregators and watchdogs
Independent projects and advocacy groups repackage and analyze DHS/ICE data — for instance, the Deportation Data Project hosts cleaned, public ICE datasets and tools for reporters and advocates, and policy groups such as the American Immigration Council critique how DHS defines “criminal” removals and highlight how broad categories (e.g., traffic offenses, reentry) inflate the “criminal” label [8][9]. These external sources are useful for interpretation, but should be cross‑checked against the original OHSS/ICE tables because methodologies and exclusions vary [9][8].
6. Practical next steps to obtain the tables
To retrieve annual deportation breakdowns by conviction type, begin at OHSS’s Yearbook and Annual Flow Report pages where tables like Table 39 and Table 41 are published, and supplement with the OHSS monthly enforcement tables for recent months; use ICE’s statistics page for ERO operational summaries and then cross-check with the OHSS reports for the offense‑level tables and methodological notes [1][2][3][6][4]. If needing cleaned, researcher‑friendly extracts, consult the Deportation Data Project and policy analyses that annotate OHSS/ICE numbers — while keeping in mind the documented exclusions for CBP‑recorded removals and differences in how “criminal” is defined [8][5][9].