ICE documented deportations under each president
Executive summary
ICE’s documented removals have become a contested ledger: federal agencies and the Trump administration publish large headline totals, independent analysts and watchdogs parse ICE’s semi‑monthly tables to reach lower or more conservative counts, and researchers point to dramatic operational shifts in enforcement patterns since President Trump’s return to office [1] [2] deportationdata.org/analysis/immigration-enforcement-first-nine-months-trump.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[3]. The result is not a single uncontested “deportation” number under each president but a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory tallies that require careful source‑by‑source reading [4] [5].
1. What the government reports: large, cumulative counts and broad claims
DHS and ICE releases under the second Trump administration present very large totals: DHS announced more than 605,000 deportations and claimed that an additional roughly 1.9 million people “self‑deported” since January 2025, and DHS messaging later asserted cumulative figures in the hundreds of thousands to millions depending on how “left the country” is defined [1] [6]. ICE’s own Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) tables remain the official administrative record for removals, and DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics publishes monthly and semi‑annual tables intended to be the statistical system of record [4] [7].
2. What independent trackers and researchers calculate from ICE data
Independent analysts arrive at different totals by scraping ICE’s semi‑monthly and fiscal‑year tables: TRAC’s accounting of ICE postings concluded that, after adjusting for removals already occurring while President Biden was still in office, some 234,211 removals occurred after Trump assumed office and that combining fiscal years brought a total of roughly 290,603 removals during the period analyzed [2]. TRAC also notes that FY2024 saw 271,484 deportations, a benchmark many analysts use for comparison [5].
3. How operational changes altered who was removed
Beyond headline counts, enforcement policy under the second Trump administration shifted who was targeted and how removals were achieved: ICE interior arrests and book‑ins reportedly quadrupled in the first nine months of the administration’s second term, producing a 4.6‑fold increase in deportations from the interior in that period, with many more people detained and far fewer released on bond [3]. Migration Policy noted that the share released from custody fell sharply — by September 2025 only about 3 percent were released compared with 26 percent in October 2024 — and that roughly 90 percent of those in ICE detention in September 2025 were deported directly from detention, versus 63 percent a year earlier [8].
4. Contradictions and why totals diverge
Different tallies diverge because sources measure different things: DHS often aggregates removals by multiple agencies and includes voluntary departures or “self‑deportations” in political messaging, whereas ICE’s removals tables cover administratively documented deportations and CBP removals may be published on a different cadence or omitted from consolidated tallies [6] [4] [7]. TRAC warned that short‑interval semi‑monthly reports can show little immediate uptick in removals after an administration change and that simple daily averages can be misleading when seasonal and reporting window effects exist [5].
5. Human impact and accountability questions in the data
Multiple watchdogs and advocacy groups stress that the quantitative story obscures qualitative harms: ICE detention populations reached record highs — about 73,000 in custody at one point — and reports from advocacy groups and legal researchers document that detention conditions, rapid expulsions, and reduced use of bond have increased the pressure to accept removal orders [9] [10]. Journalists and researchers caution that reduced transparency about who is being targeted and resettlement and repatriation agreements affect the interpretability of removal statistics [2] [8].
6. Bottom line: numbers with clear provenance, and limits to comparison
The clearest, most reproducible counts come from ICE’s ERO removals tables and OHSS monthly tables — those are the primary sources for documented ICE removals — but the totals attributed to a president depend on whether one accepts DHS political summaries (which may include voluntary departures and CBP actions) or conservative reconstructions by TRAC and academic trackers [4] [7] [2]. Independent analyses show substantial increases in interior arrests and deportations early in the second Trump term and major shifts in detention policy that materially raised removals from custody, even as exact headline totals vary by source and methodology [3] [8].