How do deportation rates compare when adjusting for border encounters, visa overstays, and removals initiated from interior enforcement?
Executive summary
When deportation totals are reweighted to account for border encounters, visa overstays, and interior-initiated removals, the picture changes: fiscal-year 2025 saw far fewer recorded border encounters than the prior year—about 444,000—while independent estimates of ICE-executed removals (which exclude many expedited returns at the border) sit near 310,000–315,000, and visa overstays remain a large, poorly enumerated share of the undocumented population [1] [2] [3]. Data definitions, duplicate counting of “events,” and systematic exclusions (expedited removal, voluntary returns, and some CBP actions) mean that any direct “rate” comparison must be treated cautiously and contextualized by where enforcement actions originate [4] [2] [5].
1. Border encounters: big headline numbers but shrinking in 2025
Border encounter statistics are the most visible figure in public debate, and CBP reported a dramatic drop in encounters at and between ports of entry to roughly 444,000 in FY2025 compared with roughly 2.1 million the year before, a decline driven by stricter border controls and asylum restrictions [1]. But CBP encounter tallies mix different categories—Title 8 apprehensions, OFO inadmissibles and Title 42 expulsions—and can include repeat contacts counted as separate “events,” complicating any simple numerator/denominator calculus [6] [7] [4]. Moreover, many border interactions end in expedited removals or voluntary returns that are not always captured in ICE removal totals used in removal-rate calculations [2] [5].
2. Visa overstays: the undercounted denominator
Visa overstays are a substantial but underreported component of unauthorized presence; academic summaries estimate 11–12 million undocumented residents in 2022 and note increased entries without inspection as well as significant numbers overstaying temporary visas, meaning the population at risk of deportation from overstays is large and diffuse [3]. Unlike a discrete “encounter,” overstays typically only enter enforcement statistics if identified during interior enforcement or during immigration processing, so removals for overstays are often hidden within ICE’s broader interior-removal figures and not separable in many public datasets [8] [9].
3. Interior enforcement: where ICE executes removals
ICE is the principal actor for interior arrests, detentions and removals; its detention and removal counts reflect operations inside the United States rather than CBP border actions [8] [9]. Independent compilations and academic work that reconcile ICE and CBP series estimate ICE-executed removals in 2025 at roughly 310,000–315,000, a series that intentionally excludes many border-processed returns and expedited removals that never enter ICE custody [2]. At the same time, ICE detention capacity and arrests grew dramatically under recent policy shifts—detentions rose from a daily average of about 39,000 to nearly 70,000 by early January 2026—an interior-enforcement expansion that can increase interior removals even while border encounters fall [10].
4. Comparing adjusted "deportation rates" — synthesis and limits
If “deportation rate” is defined as removals divided by total unauthorized population plus relevant flows, the denominator must include recent border encounters, the stock of visa overstayers, and those located by interior operations—data that live in different systems and are measured differently [4] [3] [6]. Using available reconciled series, ICE-executed removals (~310k–315k) approach the same order of magnitude as CBP-recorded FY2025 border encounters (~444k), but because many CBP encounters result in returns or expulsions excluded from ICE totals, straightforward rates can either understate or overstate enforcement emphasis depending on dataset choice [2] [1] [5]. Analysts therefore often report multiple “rates”: removals per encounter at the border; removals per identified overstay; and interior removals per interior arrests—each telling a different enforcement story and each constrained by gaps and double-counting noted in government tables [4] [2].
5. Politics, interpretation and the missing pieces
Different actors frame the same numbers to advance policy aims: administrations tout low border encounters to claim success while civil-society groups and researchers highlight rising interior detentions and exclusions from public removals counts to argue enforcement is intensifying in communities [1] [10] [11]. Crucially, public datasets exclude some expedited returns and voluntary departures that materially change numerators, and event-based reporting can count people multiple times, so any claim that “deportation rates rose/fell” without documenting which dataset and which denominator is used is incomplete [2] [4] [5]. Available sources permit broad quantitative comparisons and clear directional claims—border encounters fell and ICE removals stayed substantial—but cannot produce a single authoritative deportation rate that cleanly adjusts for every border encounter, overstay, and interior removal without additional harmonized data.