How many deportations happened in Trump’s first term
Executive summary
Counting "deportations" in Donald Trump’s first presidential term (2017–2020) depends on which measure is used: official “removals” recorded by DHS/ICE, the broader category that includes returns and expulsions, or political claims that combine removals with voluntary “self‑deportations.” Contemporary reporting and government statements produce divergent figures, but the most commonly cited midrange estimate for removals during Trump’s first term is roughly 2.0 million when returns and self‑deportations are folded in, while formal ICE removals alone in individual years were often in the low hundreds of thousands [1] [2] [3].
1. Official definitions matter—removals vs. returns vs. self‑deportation
The U.S. government uses several technical categories—“removals” (formal deportation orders executed by DHS/ICE), “returns” (people turned away at the border or returned without a formal removal order), and programmatic metrics like voluntary departures or what political messaging calls “self‑deportation”—and different reports mix those terms, producing very different totals [4] [5].
2. What DHS and White House releases claimed during and after the term
DHS and White House communications during and after Trump’s first term highlighted very large totals by combining removals with estimated self‑deportations; for example, DHS press material and White House statements touted millions of people “out of the country” and phrased results as more than half‑a‑million formal removals in specific early windows, while also reporting larger combined totals that include voluntary departures and returns [3] [6] [7].
3. Year‑by‑year ICE/DHS removal counts were much smaller than political claims
Independent trackers and reporting that focus on ICE/DHS removal records show the year‑by‑year reality was more modest: ICE reported about 225,000 removals in fiscal year 2017, and analysts have emphasized that removals under Trump, while higher in some interior‑enforcement categories than the immediately preceding years, remained below the high levels of the late‑2000s and early Obama years [2] [5] [8].
4. Independent fact‑checks and analysts produce different totals
Fact‑checking outlets and research groups point out that daily averages and partial‑year tallies often get extrapolated inaccurately; for example, some analyses cite Trump’s first‑year removals around 387,340 or place first‑term totals near 2.0 million, while other reporters and trackers produce lower totals when they count only formal ICE removals and not returns or voluntary departures [1] [4] [9].
5. Why public figures diverge so sharply
Differences stem from explicit choices: include or exclude border “returns” recorded by Customs and Border Protection; count voluntary departures or incentives to “self‑deport”; use fiscal year versus calendar year; and rely on DHS press releases versus the detailed yearly yearbooks and ICE datasets—DHS stopped publishing some detailed public removal breakdowns at points, adding to opacity and allowing competing claims [4] [10] [9].
6. Bottom line — a defensible range, and the limits of available reporting
Based on the set of sources available: if one aggregates returns, removals, and voluntary departures as some DHS statements did, first‑term totals frequently cited cluster around roughly 2.0 million people [1] [3]; if one restricts the count to formal ICE removals as reported year by year, the numbers are in the several hundreds of thousands per year (for example ~225,000 in FY2017) and add up to a substantially lower multi‑hundred‑thousand total for the term depending on precise inclusions [2] [5]. Precise reconciliation is not possible here because public DHS/ICE breakdowns and the press releases do not always use the same categories or publish identical datasets for the same periods [4] [10].