How many lawful permanent residents (green card holders) were deported in 2025–2026, by year and reason?
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Executive summary
Public sources do not publish a definitive count of how many lawful permanent residents (LPRs, “green card holders”) were removed in 2025 or 2026, so a precise year-by-year tabulation by reason cannot be produced from the available reporting; instead, federal and independent estimates place total removals in 2025 in the hundreds of thousands while acknowledging that those totals overwhelmingly cover noncitizens without lawful permanent status and that LPR-specific breakdowns are not publicly released [1] [2] [3].
1. The headline deportation totals and why they don’t answer the LPR question
Government and research organizations reported sharply higher overall removals in 2025 — for example, the Migration Policy Institute estimated ICE conducted roughly 340,000 deportations in FY2025 [1] and some outlets cite DHS figures exceeding 600,000 removals through December 2025 [2] — but both the DHS/ICE series and those independent tallies aggregate many categories of noncitizens and do not provide a clean public breakdown of removals that were specifically lawful permanent residents versus unauthorized migrants or other visa categories [2] [3].
2. What public data do show about categories and reasons for removal
ICE’s enforcement reports and DHS monthly tables classify removals by enforcement categories — broadly criminal convictions, pending criminal charges, and non-criminal immigration violations such as reentry after removal or visa overstays — and these categories describe the legal reasons someone is removable rather than immigration status at arrival, meaning LPRs convicted of certain crimes or found to have committed fraud can fall into those enforcement buckets [4] [3] [5].
3. Estimates and signals about LPR removals in 2025 and projections into 2026
Multiple sources and analyses note that enforcement expansions in 2025 increased interior removals, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating interior removals for 2025 and projecting additional orders of removal and successful removals beginning in 2026 after new legislation and expanded detention capacity, including a CBO estimate of 140,000 removals from an “other-foreign-national” category in 2025 and a projection that policy changes would generate hundreds of thousands more removals across 2026–2029 [6]; these projections imply more LPRs could be swept into removal proceedings where statutory grounds — primarily criminal convictions, fraud in immigration paperwork, long absences, or reentry after deportation — apply, but CBO and other models do not isolate LPR-only counts [6].
4. What the reporting says about specific reasons LPRs are removed
Legal commentary and practitioner reports make clear the principal legal grounds used against LPRs are serious criminal convictions that render them deportable under immigration law, fraud or material misrepresentation in obtaining status, prolonged or problematic out-of-country residence that can trigger abandonment, and denaturalization-related removals where naturalization is later voided — these are the reasons driving LPR removals when they occur, according to ICE categories and immigration attorneys’ summaries [4] [5] [7].
5. Limits of the record, competing narratives, and where to go next
Independent reporting and advocacy groups have flagged the lack of transparency — noting DHS does not publicly break out removals by lawful permanent resident status at ports of entry or in aggregate statistics, which fuels divergent narratives about whether LPRs are being “targeted” en masse or remain a small share of removals [2]; for a clearer, verifiable number one must rely on future DHS Yearbook releases or FOIA disclosures and on the monthly ICE/OHSS enforcement tables that may permit more granular reconstruction over time [8] [3].