How do Biden-era deportation numbers compare to Trump and Obama administrations by year and category?

1. How the headline totals compare: cumulative removals and fiscal-year spikes

Counting removals broadly — a category that includes formal removals, voluntary returns, and other administrative departures — mainstream reporting finds roughly 4.6 million people removed between January 2021 and November 2024 under Biden, compared with about 2.0–2.1 million removals in Trump’s first term and roughly 5.3 million across Obama’s two terms, though totals vary by reporter and timeframe ^{[1] [3]}. Fiscal-year snapshots show Biden-era monthly and annual spikes — for example March 2022 registered an unusually high monthly total and FY2024 reported 271,484 deportations — but differences in fiscal-year timing and counting rules (DHS fiscal years run October–September) complicate one-to-one year-by-year comparisons ^{[1] [4]}.

2. Category matters: “returns” versus formal removals and the Biden distinguishing feature

The most important categorical split is between formal removals (deportations ordered by immigration authorities) and returns, where an individual acknowledges an unlawful entry and leaves voluntarily; under Biden, a majority of deportations have been returns for the first time since Obama’s early years, a shift driven by diplomatic agreements with sending countries and operational choices at the border ^[2]. Migration Policy Institute analysis emphasizes this structural change and notes that returns dominated Biden-era statistics in contrast to some prior administrations where interior removals and formal orders were a larger share ^[2].

3. Interior enforcement, criminal-case removals and tactical shifts

Different administrations have prioritized different enforcement tactics: Obama’s early years included high interior removals tied to programs like Secure Communities, producing large figures early in that presidency; Trump and Biden each reconfigured priorities and tactics, with Trump pivoting to publicized community arrests and a more aggressive publicity posture, and Biden using diplomatic negotiation and return pathways to increase departures to a wider set of countries ^{[5] [6] [2]}. TRAC and other trackers highlight that daily-deportation averages and arrest patterns vary substantially by period and that changes in where arrests occur (jail-based versus at-large) influence the raw totals reported ^{[7] [6]}.

4. Why raw comparisons can mislead: definitional differences and political framing

All sides deploy the raw numbers for political narratives: plaintiffs and critics label Obama a “deporter-in-chief” while others call Biden a “returner-in-chief,” and the Trump administration presents mass-deportation claims as evidence of success — yet many outlets and analysts warn that counting conventions (returns, repatriations, expulsions under Title 42, voluntary departures) and diplomatic arrangements with foreign governments can produce very different portraits of enforcement intensity ^{[2] [8] [9]}. Fact-checkers and migration experts repeatedly note that apples-to-apples annualized and category-specific comparisons require parsing DHS raw data line-by-line, something public reporting sometimes summarizes imperfectly ^{[9] [4]}.

5. What the available reporting cannot fully resolve

The sources together establish broad patterns — Biden’s larger aggregate removals in the 2021–2024 window, the prominence of returns in Biden-era figures, and Obama’s historically high totals — but none of the provided reports fully standardizes year-by-year tables across administrations that isolate interior removals, border expulsions, Title 42 expulsions, or criminal-case removals for each fiscal year in a single harmonized dataset, so precise per-year, per-category side-by-side tallies remain unresolved in this reporting ^{[4] [2] [1]}.