How many lawful permanent residents were removed by ICE in 2025 and 2026, by year and country of origin?
Executive summary
Publicly available official datasets and the reporting assembled here do not provide a clear, sourced count of how many lawful permanent residents (LPRs, “green card” holders) were removed by ICE in calendar years 2025 and 2026 broken down by year and country of origin; the government’s OHSS/ICE removal tables and independent trackers publish total removals and partial time series but the sources in hand do not contain an explicit LPR-by-country table for 2025–2026 [1] [2] [3]. What can be stated with confidence is that total ICE removals in this period were large and under active re-estimation by researchers, but disaggregated LPR-by-country figures are not present in the cited datasets and reporting [4] [5].
1. What the official sources say about removals overall, not LPRs specifically
DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics posts monthly tables and annual yearbooks that are the statistical systems of record for removals and returns and which contain many cross‑tabulations by citizenship and enforcement categories, but the specific LPR-by-country counts for 2025 and 2026 are not visible in the versions cited here [1] [6]. ICE’s public statistics dashboards summarize arrests, detentions and removals through December 31, 2024, and describe methodology and operational priorities, yet the dashboards referenced in these sources do not publish an explicit, up‑to‑the‑minute LPR-by-country removal matrix for FY2025 or FY2026 within the material provided [2].
2. Independent estimates and partial tallies that illustrate scale — still not LPR breakdowns
Analysts have estimated total removals for 2025 at roughly 310,000–315,000 based on combined sources (including Deportation Data Project and ICE detention reports), and have flagged that official monthly releases are less complete than in prior years, prompting assumptions about 2026 removals being “around 310,000 or will increase” [4] [3]. TRAC’s compilation of ICE postings shows ICE reporting 56,392 removals “so far in FY 2026” and indicates ICE posted year‑end FY2025 figures, but TRAC’s discussion aggregates removals and does not extract the subset who were lawful permanent residents by country [5].
3. Why the LPR-by-country numbers aren’t reliably extractable from the available reporting
The difficulty is methodological and disclosure‑based: datasets used by researchers often exclude expedited border removals or present counts at different jurisdictional cutoffs, and ICE/OHSS releases referenced here either stop at 2024 dashboards or provide removal totals without the specific LPR legal‑status flag and country crosswalk needed to produce an LPR-by-country table for 2025–2026 [4] [3] [2]. Independent trackers (Deportation Data Project, Human Rights First flight monitors) document enforcement flights and aggregate removals through mid‑2025 or September 2025, but they too do not publish a validated LPR-by-country removals breakdown for the full calendar years 2025 and 2026 in the materials cited [7] [3].
4. Alternative viewpoints, transparency gaps and how to close them
Government transparency advocates and migration researchers emphasize that OHSS monthly tables and the Yearbook are the place to find disaggregated removal statistics if and when those tables include an LPR legal‑status field and country of removal — a capability implied by the OHSS persistence dataset but not realized in the provided releases for 2025–2026 [1] [6]. Researchers caution that press estimates (including Brookings’ projection of removals) combine CBP and ICE activities and sometimes treat expedited removals differently, producing divergent totals; therefore any attempt to state LPR removals by country without direct OHSS/ICE tabulations risks error [4].
5. Bottom line and recommended next steps for a definitive answer
There is no authoritative, sourced count in the provided reporting that lists the number of lawful permanent residents removed by ICE in 2025 and 2026 broken down by year and country of origin; available sources provide total removal estimates and partial fiscal tallies but not the requested LPR-by-country matrix [1] [4] [5] [3]. To obtain a definitive answer, the next step is to query OHSS’s monthly tables and Yearbook files directly for a table specifically titled or coded “Removals by immigration status and citizenship” (or to file an ICE/OHSS FOIA request if the table is not publicly posted), because the office’s persist dataset is explicitly the system of record for such cross‑tabulations [1] [6].