Compare deportations from US from 2020 through December, 2025
Executive summary
Between 2020 and December 2025, U.S. removals and expulsions moved through three distinct phases—near‑shutdown of regular deportation channels during the pandemic and Title 42 expulsions (2020–2022), a restrained but steady post‑pandemic period under the Biden administration (2022–2024), and a sharp surge in deportation activity under the second Trump administration in 2025—yet public and official tallies disagree sharply because of differing definitions (removals vs. expulsions vs. voluntary departures) and gaps in DHS reporting [1] [2] [3].
1. 2020–2021: Pandemic distortion and Title 42 expulsions
The pandemic collapsed normal processes: federal public‑health authority (Title 42) was used to expel irregular border crossers from March 2020 through May 2023, producing roughly 3 million expulsions that are counted separately from immigration removals and complicate year‑to‑year comparisons [1] [2]. Official DHS operational reporting systems and OHSS monthly tables note that their “events” counts include encounters, expulsions and removals but that people can be counted more than once, making headline year totals sensitive to measurement choices [4].
2. 2022–2024: A modest rebound and mixed metrics under Biden
After Title 42 remained in place through early 2023, removals under traditional ICE processes remained well below pre‑pandemic peaks; migration analysts observed that much of the “enforcement” during 2020–2023 manifested as Title 42 expulsions rather than ICE removals, and ICE’s own categorization includes voluntary departures and returns that are not always comparable to formal removals [1] [2]. Migration Policy Institute and DHS reporting show a shift in the composition of border encounters—more non‑Mexican nationalities and families—making deportations more legally and logistically complex and keeping formal removal numbers lower than simple encounter counts suggest [2].
3. 2025: Multiple competing tallies and a clear surge
Fiscal‑year and calendar‑year counting diverge sharply in 2025: DHS press releases claim cumulative figures in the hundreds of thousands—DHS asserted that more than 527,000 removals had occurred by late October 2025 and later that more than 605,000 deportations took place since January 20, 2025—while independent analysts estimate lower ICE removal totals [5] [6] [3]. The Migration Policy Institute estimated roughly 340,000 ICE removals in FY2025 after sifting public ICE and CBP figures, a figure well below some DHS public statements but aligned with ICE’s own fiscal tables and third‑party aggregations [3]. Journalistic trackers such as The Guardian and researchers processing ICE biweekly detention tables documented major upticks in arrests, detentions and removals through 2025, corroborating that enforcement intensified even if exact totals vary by source [7].
4. Who was removed or expelled—and why numbers diverge
Different sources categorize removals differently: ICE distinguishes people with criminal convictions, those with no convictions but immigration violations, and returns/voluntary departures; watchdogs and think tanks noted a rise in arrests of people without serious criminal convictions during 2025, which changed the profile of removals compared with prior years [1] [8]. Advocacy and civil‑liberties groups, as well as analyses of nonpublic ICE data, reported that a large share of 2025 interior arrests involved people without violent criminal histories—claims that feed critiques of the scale and targeting of the 2025 operations [8].
5. Data limitations, political agendas and the bottom line
Public figures for 2020–2025 are accurate only within their definitional and reporting frameworks: OHSS warns that its monthly tables count events and can duplicate people, ICE and DHS use different categories, and DHS press releases emphasize programmatic successes in politically salient terms—so a “surge” in 2025 is indisputable in direction but not in uniform headline magnitude across sources [4] [1] [5]. Independent estimates (MPI, media trackers, academic projects) converge on the qualitative story—deportations fell under pandemic distortions, then rose markedly in 2025—but diverge quantitatively [2] [3] [7]. Given those limits, the most defensible comparative statement is: formal ICE removals were depressed during 2020–2022 (with millions expelled under Title 42 instead), rose modestly in 2023–24, and then increased substantially in 2025—though reported totals for 2025 range from roughly 340,000 (MPI estimate of FY2025 ICE removals) to DHS’s public tallies exceeding 500,000–600,000 depending on the metric used [1] [2] [3] [5] [6].