How have removal trends (by source country and criminality) shifted in FY2025 compared with FY2024 according to Brookings and MPI?
Executive summary
Brookings and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) do not offer a direct, public statistical comparison of FY2025 versus FY2024 removals by source country and criminality; public removal totals and quarter spikes come from ICE and related federal reporting, while Brookings’ work touches on poverty–crime links and MPI documents country-level deprivation but neither provides the removal breakdown the question requests [1] [2] [3]. What can be said is that federal enforcement tallies show large quarter-to-quarter variation in FY2024 and that immigration adjudication backlogs remained enormous into FY2025—context that complicates simple year-to-year interpretation [1] [4].
1. What the enforcement numbers actually show: a FY2024 spike, not a Brookings/MPI narrative
ICE reported that in the third quarter of FY2024 it removed nearly 68,000 noncitizens, a surge that drew attention to an enforcement uptick within that fiscal year, but that ICE release does not parse removals by detailed source-country shifts or criminality breakdowns for FY2025 versus FY2024 in a way Brookings or MPI would analyze [1]. Federal encounter reporting structures (CBP) separate types of border encounters—Title 8 apprehensions, OFO inadmissibles, and Title 42 expulsions—so raw activity can rise without producing a neat country-by-country removal story unless agencies publish that cross-tabulated data [5].
2. What Brookings provides — context, not a removal ledger
Brookings’ scholarship cited here links poverty to crime dynamics and offers interpretive frameworks that could inform hypotheses about why migrants from certain countries appear in enforcement statistics, but that research does not present FY2024–FY2025 deportation tables or an empirical country-by-country removal change log; using Brookings to supply exact removal shifts would overextend its remit [2]. Brookings’ analytical lens is useful for interpreting push factors—poverty and opportunity structures—but it is not a substitute for ICE enforcement counts or EOIR case-processing metrics [2].
3. What the MPI offers — structural drivers, not removal tallies
The MPI reports (OPHI) map multidimensional poverty across countries and can help explain changing migration pressures from specific origin states, yet MPI publications do not catalogue U.S. removal statistics by origin or by criminal conviction status for FY2025 versus FY2024; they supply socioeconomic context, not enforcement outcomes [3] [6]. Relying on MPI to claim removals shifted because poverty rose in a set of countries would require stitching together MPI country data with U.S. enforcement records—a nontrivial inference beyond MPI’s own claims [3].
4. Adjudication and backlog dynamics that muddle year-to-year comparisons
Immigration court filings and pendency provide essential context: EOIR received roughly 831,000 defensive asylum applications in FY2025 versus 897,633 in FY2024, and pending asylum cases declined slightly from about 2,472,766 at the end of FY2024 to 2,424,061 at the end of FY2025, a modest change that signals continuing processing constraints which can delay or defer removals and thus distort simple fiscal-year comparisons [4]. Those backlog dynamics mean enforcement totals in one quarter or year can reflect capacity, policy shifts, or administrative prioritization as much as changes in the origin countries of migrants.
5. Competing narratives and hidden agendas in available sources
ICE’s own public releases emphasize enforcement milestones and may frame increases as policy success without fully disaggregating criminality versus administrative removals in every summary [1], while advocacy or third‑party aggregators can amplify selective figures—such as large quarterly removals or administrative arrests in early FY2025—sometimes without the methodological transparency needed to verify country or criminal-status shifts [7]. Brookings and MPI offer analytic frames that can be used to argue either for stricter enforcement (linking migration to crime or deprivation) or for humanitarian and development responses (addressing root causes), so readers should attend to each source’s institutional aims when interpreting claims [2] [3].
Conclusion: what can be asserted with confidence
No authoritative, publicly available Brookings or MPI report provides the direct FY2025-versus-FY2024, source-country-and-criminality removal breakdown requested; the empirical removal spikes documented publicly come from ICE quarterly counts and federal encounter and adjudication data, which show large FY2024 quarter surges and continued adjudicatory backlogs into FY2025—facts that constrain, but do not answer, the precise comparative question without further targeted agency cross-tabulations [1] [5] [4] [2] [3].