To remove all the illegals in the country in three years how many have to deported each month
Executive summary
Removing the entire undocumented population in the United States over three years would require deporting roughly 305,000 people per month if the baseline population is about 11 million — a back-of-the-envelope figure that depends heavily on which population estimate and which removals are counted [1]. Historic and recent removal rates show the scale of that challenge: government and independent estimates put achievable annual deportations well below what a sustained three‑year purge would demand [2] [3].
1. The math: how many per month and per day
Using a common midpoint estimate of roughly 11 million people living in the United States without lawful status, dividing that total across 36 months yields about 305,556 deportations per month, or about 10,185 removals per day (11,000,000 / 36 ≈ 305,556) [1]. If the undocumented population were larger or smaller, the monthly figure scales linearly; for example, a 14 million population would require about 388,889 removals per month, while 8 million would require about 222,222 per month [1].
2. What counts as a “deportation” matters
Official counts mix several categories — formal removals with orders, returns at the border, expulsions, and voluntary “self‑deportations” — and different sources sometimes conflate them, so headline numbers can be misleading [4] [5]. DHS press releases in 2025–26 have aggregated removals and voluntary departures to claim millions have left in short periods, but those totals include returns and self‑deports alongside formal deportations [5] [6] [7] [8]. Analysts and NGOs distinguish interior removals (ICE) from border returns (CBP) because the logistics, legal processes, and resource needs differ substantially [9] [2].
3. Capacity versus aspiration: historical benchmarks
Historic peaks in expedited removals and removals provide context: expedited removals once reached roughly 197,000 in FY2013 and total removals in some years have been in the several‑hundred‑thousand range, but those were achieved under specific policies and operational contexts [3]. Recent fiscal‑year estimates vary: the Migration Policy Institute estimated about 340,000 ICE deportations in FY2025, while other official tallies for parts of recent years show hundreds of thousands of removals when border expulsions and returns are included [2] [10]. Those figures are generally far below the sustained ~3.6 million per year implied by the three‑year, 11‑million scenario.
4. Practical and legal constraints that reduce feasible monthly rates
Scaling removals to the 300k+ monthly level would confront diplomatic, logistical, legal, and fiscal barriers: deportation flights, bilateral repatriation agreements, detention capacity, court processes for removal orders, and international pushback all limit throughput, and DHS itself has noted resource constraints affecting deportation flights and operations [9] [3]. Moreover, expedited removal and reinstatement authorities can speed some cases, but asylum and credible‑fear protections create legal pauses and judicial reviews that slow mass removals [3].
5. Politics, messaging, and incentives in the data
Public DHS releases in 2025–26 have emphasized large totals of people “leaving,” combining removals with voluntary departures and self‑deportation incentives; those releases serve political narratives about enforcement success and carry an implicit agenda to portray rapid population reductions [5] [6] [7] [8]. Independent analysts caution that conflating categories obscures how many interior removals require sustained enforcement effort versus how many are border returns or voluntary exits [9] [2]. Any three‑year plan would therefore need to define exactly which categories count, secure legal and diplomatic capacity for continual repatriations, and reckon with the political tradeoffs of large‑scale enforcement [9] [2].