How many illegal criminals deported
Executive summary
Official tallies of deportations and removals since January 2025 vary widely depending on the source and the definitions used: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has publicly claimed roughly 605,000 formal deportations and an overall 2.5 million "illegal aliens" leaving the U.S. when including voluntary self-deportations [1] [2], while independent trackers and agency data show smaller, more specific counts—ICE and TRAC report hundreds of thousands of removals and court-ordered deportation orders but not the large aggregate DHS headline [3] [4] [5].
1. What the question is really asking — “How many illegal criminals deported”
The query collapses three different measures: the number of people formally deported by U.S. authorities, the subset of those who have criminal convictions, and the broader category of people without lawful status who left voluntarily; U.S. sources report each differently and sometimes conflate them for political effect [5] [1] [2].
2. The headline numbers: DHS claims and how they’re packaged
DHS has publicly promoted a cumulative figure of about 2.5 million "illegal aliens" leaving the country since January 2025, saying more than 605,000 were deported by DHS enforcement and about 1.9 million “self-deported” [1] [2]. Those DHS press statements are explicit about deportations versus voluntary departures but rely on agency estimates for the latter; reporting has flagged that DHS has not fully explained the methodology behind its self-deportation estimates [6].
3. What independent and operational datasets show
Operational and court-focused data give narrower but more verifiable pictures: ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations publishes removals and categorizations of who is targeted, including nonconvicted immigration violators and repeat re‑entrants [5], while TRAC/other oversight groups report concrete counts such as roughly 56,392 removals recorded early in FY2026 and a combined total in the low hundreds of thousands when FY2025 and FY2026 figures are added [3]. TRAC also notes immigration judges issued roughly 528,333 removal or voluntary departure orders through September 2025, a separate metric from executed removals [4]. Migration Policy documents that fiscal-year encounters and enforcement surged in 2025, reporting about 444,000 migrant encounters in FY2025 as context for removals activity [7].
4. Who is counted as a “criminal” — the crucial distinction
Federal reporting and advocacy groups distinguish between people removed for criminal convictions and those removed for immigration violations without criminal convictions; ICE’s categories explicitly include people with no convictions (visa overstays, re‑entrants, immigration fugitives) as well as people deemed threats to public safety [5]. DHS’s public tallies of “deportations” do not always break down the convicted-criminal subset in its headline releases, and independent reporting has highlighted that DHS’s larger messaging can blur voluntary departures with formal criminal deportations for political effect [6] [2].
5. Reconciling the numbers and the short answer
If the question seeks the number of people formally deported by U.S. agencies since January 2025, the most reliable official line is that DHS/ICE report roughly 527,000–605,000 deportations/removals in that span depending on the specific DHS release cited, with TRAC and ICE operational tallies supporting a several-hundred-thousand figure but not the 2.5 million headline, because that larger number includes agency estimates of voluntary self-deportations and is therefore not equivalent to formal removals [2] [1] [3] [4]. If the question specifically asks how many deported individuals were convicted criminals, available public sources do not provide a single, definitive aggregated count breaking out convictions across all these removals in the DHS/ICE public briefs; ICE’s own categories and court data show that many removals are of non‑convicted immigration violators [5] [4].
Conclusion
The best, evidence-based reply: several hundred thousand formal deportations have been carried out since January 2025 (DHS and ICE give figures in the 500,000–600,000 range when cited by administration releases), but the administration’s 2.5 million figure mixes formal deportations with estimated voluntary departures; public data do not provide a single verified total for “illegal criminals deported” because sources separate convicted criminal removals from broader immigration removals and voluntary exits in different ways [1] [2] [3] [5] [4]. Independent trackers and reporting recommend treating the DHS aggregate claims with caution and looking to ICE/TRAC/EOIR datasets for the clearest counts of formal removals and court-ordered deportations [3] [4] [8].