How many illegal immigrants deported under presidents
Executive summary
Counting how many people were deported under any given U.S. president is fraught: official statistics use different categories (removals, returns, expulsions, repatriations), data are reported by fiscal year, and emergency policies such as Title 42 produced large “expulsions” that are often conflated with deportations; using available sources, Barack Obama’s two terms saw roughly 3 million formal removals or repatriations, George W. Bush’s two terms about 2 million, the Biden administration’s combined removals and Title 42 expulsions approached 4.4 million through FY2024, and recent reporting estimates the second Trump administration carried out roughly a half‑million repatriations in its first year though figures vary by source [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What “deported” actually means — three categories and one major caveat
Official U.S. data distinguish removals (formal deportations based on an order), returns or administrative departures (non‑ordered departures), and expulsions under border public‑health orders like Title 42; commentators and agencies frequently group these into “repatriations,” so any head‑to‑head presidential comparison must be explicit about which categories are included [5] [3].
2. The Obama era — roughly 3 million removals and returns over eight years
Multiple analyses and historical tallies credit the Obama administration with about 3 million noncitizens removed or returned across his two terms, a figure commonly cited in scholarly and media accounts and reflected in retrospective databases used by researchers [1] [2].
3. George W. Bush and earlier highs — about 2 million in Bush’s two terms
Scholarly retrospectives and university summaries place George W. Bush’s administration at roughly 2 million deportations across two terms, driven in part by workplace enforcement and programs such as Secure Communities that expanded interior removals [2].
4. Biden: record repatriations when expulsions are counted — nearly 4.4 million through FY2024
The Migration Policy Institute emphasizes that when removals are combined with Title 42 expulsions and other administrative returns, the Biden administration’s repatriations reached nearly 4.4 million through FY2024, with roughly 3 million expulsions under Title 42 alone between March 2020 and May 2023 accounting for the bulk [3].
5. Trump (second administration) — high visibility, contested totals around hundreds of thousands
Independent news analyses and FOIA‑based trackers diverge but point to large numbers in Trump’s second term: The New York Times estimated about 230,000 removals of people arrested inside the country and roughly 270,000 at the border over the past year in its January 2026 analysis, while TRAC and FOIA analyses put early 2025 removals in the low hundreds of thousands and noted gaps in official transparency [4] [6] [7].
6. Why numbers differ so dramatically between sources and administrations
Differences arise because (a) agencies changed counting methods over time and report by fiscal year rather than by presidential tenure, (b) removals versus expulsions versus voluntary departures are not uniformly tallied as “deportations,” and (c) recent administrations have either publicized or withheld detailed datasets, prompting researchers (TRAC, NYT, MPI) to reconstruct totals from fragmented agency tables and FOIA releases [5] [7] [4].
7. Bottom line and limits of available reporting
The best available cross‑source summary is that Obama’s two terms saw about 3 million removals/returns, George W. Bush about 2 million, Biden’s administration achieved nearly 4.4 million repatriations when Title 42 expulsions are included through FY2024, and reporting on the recent Trump administration’s removals points to roughly several hundred thousand in a year though exact totals vary and some DHS claims (e.g., 2.5 million “left the U.S.”) require careful parsing of voluntary departures versus enforced removals; where sources conflict, transparency gaps in DHS and changes in counting methodology limit definitive attribution [1] [2] [3] [4] [8].