How many illegals in the United States for more than 5 years have b een deported
Executive summary
There is no authoritative public count of how many people who had lived in the United States for more than five years were deported; available federal data and independent trackers report removals and returns but do not consistently break those figures down by length of residence, forcing analysts to rely on proxies and partial datasets [1] [2] [3]. Reporting and government releases provide totals for removals, returns and interior removals across years, and these numbers show large-scale enforcement but cannot be translated directly into a precise tally of deportations of migrants who had been in the U.S. for over five years [4] [5] [6].
1. What the public data actually measure — and what they don’t
The Department of Homeland Security and its components publish monthly and annual tables counting “removals,” “returns,” and “encounters,” and ICE’s enforcement reports enumerate arrests and removals, but these sources rarely, if ever, include a reliable field for “years present in the United States,” making it impossible to directly identify removals of people present longer than five years from those public datasets [1] [2] [7]. Independent trackers and news organizations—The Guardian and TRAC among them—compile frequent tallies from ICE and CBP releases that illuminate overall enforcement intensity, detention levels, and criminality of detainees, but they, too, work from the same underlying tables that lack a consistent “time-in-country” variable [3] [8].
2. What proxy numbers tell us about scale — not tenure
Contextual figures show the scale of removals: CBO estimated roughly 140,000 interior removals in 2025 based on ICE-supplied data and projected larger surges tied to policy changes, and has projected tens of thousands of additional removals tied to recent legislation and court case backlogs [4]. Migration Policy and other analysts documented spikes in removals and returns in years where border expulsions and expedited processes dominated: for example, around 775,000 unauthorized migrants were removed or returned during one post-Title 42 year, a figure that mixes short-stay expulsions with longer-term removals [5]. Historical tallies compiled by other sites put cumulative deportations in the millions over past decades (e.g., 4.6 million from 2003–2018), but those are aggregate counts that likewise do not isolate length of prior residence [6].
3. Why length-of-stay is hard to capture and politically sensitive
Length-of-stay would require pairing removal records with reliable entry or adjustment histories, something routinely imperfect in enforcement systems; many encounters at the border are recorded as “returns” or “expulsions” tied to an event rather than a person’s multi-year residency, and DHS and ICE have operational reasons to categorize outcomes differently depending on policy goals—affecting public perceptions of enforcement success [2] [7]. Political actors on all sides treat headline removal totals as evidence of policy effectiveness or humanitarian harm, and that framing can obscure the analytical need to separate short-term border expulsions from interior removals of long-settled residents [9] [10].
4. Best available conclusion and recommended next steps for a precise count
Based on the reporting and datasets available, it is not possible to state a precise number of people who had been in the U.S. more than five years and were deported because no source in the public record provided that specific breakdown [1] [2]. To produce a defensible figure would require DHS/ICE or a research project to link removal records to entry dates or other administrative histories and publish a dedicated “years in country” cross-tab; researchers should press DHS, FOIA requests, TRAC and the Deportation Data Project for such disaggregations and for clarity about how returns, expulsions, voluntary departures and formal removals are counted [4] [8] [3].