How many immigrants were deported under the Biden administration by year (2021-2025)?
Executive summary
The precise count of immigrants deported under President Biden year‑by‑year (2021–2025) cannot be stated with single‑number certainty from the available reporting because major outlets and datasets use different definitions (removals vs. returns, fiscal year vs. calendar year, partial-year counts) and the public summaries conflict; for example, one compilation puts FY2021 removals at 59,011 while other reporting describes hundreds of thousands or even 685,000 removals in FY2024 [1] [2]. The strongest defensible conclusion is that deportations rose substantially after a very low 2021 baseline, peaked in the final full year of the administration per multiple accounts, and that 2025 counts attributable to Biden are necessarily small because he left office on January 20, 2025 [3] [1] [2].
1. What the question actually asks — and why reporting disagrees
Asking “How many immigrants were deported under the Biden administration by year (2021–2025)?” requires three choices that change the answer: whether to count fiscal years (FY) or calendar years; whether to include “administrative returns” and Title 42 expulsions as “deportations”; and whether to attribute January 2025 removals to the Biden administration or to the incoming president; reporting sources use different mixes, which produces wildly different annual totals [4] [3] [1].
2. The low 2021 baseline and competing single‑year summaries
Some data summaries show FY2021 as an unusually low year — one source cites FY2021 removals at 59,011, calling it “the lowest deportation numbers in decades” and highlighting a 68% fall from the prior year [1]. By contrast, other outlets describe multi‑hundred‑thousand annual tallies later in the term; for instance, reporting that FY2024 saw roughly 685,000 total deportations, a number used to argue FY2024 was the administration’s high‑water mark [2]. Both claims are published in the provided material, but they reflect different counting conventions — one appears to count formal removals narrowly, the other reports a broader total of deportations and returns [1] [2].
3. Trend summary from authoritative compilations
Migration Policy Project analyzed DHS and OHSS data and concluded that the Biden administration carried out roughly 1.1 million deportations and returns from the start of FY2021 through February 2024 — putting the administration on a trajectory to match the roughly 1.5 million removals in four years under Trump, depending on how returns are tallied [3]. That tally signals a sharp rise after FY2021’s low point, with the administration carrying out many “administrative returns” in the intervening years [3].
4. Why FY2024 looks large in multiple accounts
Several reports and watchdog counts treat FY2024 as the administration’s largest single‑year total: one projection and analysis combined DHS figures to report hundreds of thousands of removals in FY2024 [2], and contemporaneous media reviewed monthly DHS tallies that showed large monthly episodes — November 2024 was cited as nearly 49,000 removals in one month by Newsweek’s roundup of DHS monthly figures [5]. These accounts converge on a boom in removals by the final year, though they differ on the exact total depending on whether they include returns and expulsions [5] [2].
5. The 2025 problem — attribution and partial counts
Any annual figure for 2025 under Biden is inherently limited: Biden left office January 20, 2025, so calendar‑year 2025 totals largely fall under the next administration. Some outlets report two‑week removal counts around the 2025 inauguration and early February, but those figures are reported by DHS in a way that overlaps administrations and therefore cannot be cleanly attributed to Biden without the original DHS day‑by‑day tabulation [5]. Scholarly and watchdog sources included here either stop at February 2024 or shift to analyzing the next administration’s FY2025 data because of that attribution problem [3] [6] [2].
6. Bottom line and what’s missing
The answer depends on definitions: using one narrowly defined government series yields FY2021 ≈ 59,011 and then rising yearly totals through FY2024; broader tallies and media summaries place the administration’s total removals and returns in the hundreds of thousands per year by FY2024 and at roughly 1.1 million removals/returns from FY2021 through Feb 2024 [1] [3] [2]. The provided sources conflict enough that producing a single clean per‑year table for 2021–2025 under Biden would be misleading; the authoritative resolution requires consulting DHS/OHSS or ICE yearly tables and defining which categories (administrative returns, Title 42 expulsions, formal removals) are included — data those sources publish but which were summarized differently across the reporting here [4] [3].