US Deportations by country

1. What the government actually publishes: country breakdowns exist, but across systems

U.S. authorities provide removals and returns broken out by country of citizenship: ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations offers arrests, removals and detention counts by country and by categories of criminal history, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) produces monthly and yearbook tables that include “aliens returned by region and country” ^{[1] [2] [6]}. Customs and Border Protection separately reports “encounters” and expulsions (including Title 42-era expulsions) that result in returns to countries of last transit or origin, and that CBP data feed is an important part of any country-level accounting ^[5].

2. The headline totals: competing figures and what they mean

Recent public claims from DHS and White House spokespeople assert very large totals—DHS statements in late 2025 asserted more than 600,000 formal deportations plus nearly 1.9 million “self-deported” since early 2025, a claim presented as 2.5 million people leaving ^[3]. Independent analysts and data journalists caution those administration totals can be misleading without disaggregation because DHS combines removals, returns and voluntary departures across multiple components and CBP encounter categories; close scrutiny of OHSS and component data shows gaps and definitional differences that make single-number comparisons fraught ^{[4] [2]}.

3. Who shows up at the top of country lists — and why interpretation matters

Historically and in contemporary datasets Mexico and other contiguous countries dominate removals because of geography and volume of border encounters; ICE and OHSS country tables routinely show Mexico as the largest single-country destination for returns and removals ^{[1] [6]}. But removals to a given country can come from distinct enforcement streams: interior ICE removals of long-term residents or people with judicial orders, CBP expulsions of recent border crossers, and diplomatic repatriation programs—so country totals conflate different operational practices and legal contexts ^{[1] [5] [2]}.

4. Data wrinkles: detention surges, expulsions, and voluntary departures

Detention caseloads and rapid operational changes influence who is deported; independent trackers reported record-high ICE detention populations in early 2026 and site-level concentrations in facilities like El Paso, which shapes removal flows and timing ^{[7] [8]}. CBP encounter and Title 42-era expulsions (now closed but historically significant) are recorded differently than ICE removals and can inflate short-term repatriation totals to neighboring countries ^[5]. Analysts also note that voluntary departures, self-deportations and coerced “returns” are operationally and legally distinct from formal removals and are often counted in public messaging without consistent labeling ^{[4] [9]}.

5. Big-picture context: deportations are only part of migration dynamics

Scholars warn that even large numbers of removals represent only one component of net migration; demographic and economic analyses show that declines in net immigration in 2025–26 reflected both enforcement-driven exits and a sharp drop in inflows, and that deportations alone did not account for the entirety of recent population changes ^{[10] [11]}. For practical country-by-country analysis, the OHSS monthly tables and ICE country dashboards are the authoritative sources to extract which nationalities are most frequently returned, but their figures must be read alongside CBP encounter data and critical examinations of administrative counting methods ^{[2] [1] [5] [4]}.