How many immigrants did donald trump deport during his first term as president
Executive summary
Available reporting does not point to a single, undisputed total, but the best-supported summary of published data indicates roughly 1.2 million people were removed under formal removal orders during Donald Trump’s first presidential term (2017–2020) — with annual and monthly figures that varied widely and multiple competing tallies reported by government and media sources [1] [2] [3].
1. What the core government and independent counts show
Official and journalistic counts separate “removals” (formal deportations) from “returns” and “self‑deportations,” and when one looks only at removal orders for 2017–2020 the reporting cited here places the total near 1.2 million removals across Trump’s first term; Context by TRF summarizes that “nearly 1.2 million people were deported through removal orders” during that period while also noting almost 600,000 returns, which many accounts treat separately [1].
2. How annual and monthly snapshots complicate a single headline number
Yearly and monthly tallies shifted a lot: ICE reported about 225,000 removals in fiscal year 2017 alone, signaling a large early‑term output, while previously unpublished DHS month‑by‑month data showed 37,660 removals in Trump’s first month in office — illustrating how totals are built from uneven flows and cannot be read as a steady pace [2] [3].
3. Methodology matters: removals vs. returns vs. arrests
Analysts repeatedly warn that different tallies measure different things: “removals” are formal deportations, “returns” often refer to expedited returns at the border, and “arrests” are not equivalent to completed removals; reporting stresses that Trump-era enforcement emphasized interior ICE arrests and detention even as overall removal statistics did not reach the peaks of earlier administrations, which makes apples‑to‑apples comparison difficult [4] [5].
4. Conflicting claims and outlier figures
Some outlets and later government releases have presented much larger or smaller totals — including an unverified figure claiming more than 3 million deportations in Trump’s first term and DHS releases tied to the administration’s 2025 campaigns that aggregate removals and voluntary departures into much larger numbers — but those claims conflict with contemporaneous DHS/ICE breakdowns and independent analyses that keep removals distinct from returns or self‑deportations [6] [7] [8] [9].
5. What independent analyses emphasize about scope and context
News analyses and policy researchers emphasize that Trump’s border and interior enforcement changed tactics (more at‑large arrests, expanded detention), producing high‑visibility operations even while total removals were concentrated in specific years and categories; independent outlets note that enforcement intensity and legal constraints, pandemic disruptions, and the separation of removals and returns all shaped the final counts [10] [11] [5].
6. Bottom line and limits of available reporting
Based on the sources available here, the defensible answer is that roughly 1.2 million people were removed under formal removal orders during Donald Trump’s first term (2017–2020), while other tallies that include returns, voluntary departures, or later aggregated DHS claims produce very different—and sometimes conflicting—totals; sourcing and methodology determine which number is quoted, and the reporting provided does not yield a single uncontested universal total [1] [2] [4].