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Fact check: How many Muslim immigrants have been deported from the US since 2021?

Checked on October 14, 2025

Executive Summary

No authoritative source in the provided material gives a concrete count of how many Muslim immigrants have been deported from the United States since 2021. The available documents address deportations, removals, and detention trends broadly, and include specific enforcement snapshots and individual cases, but none report deportations disaggregated by religion; the data needed to answer the question directly is absent from the supplied sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8].

1. Why the direct number is missing — the data gap that matters

The supplied federal reports and analyses document enforcement activity, removals by nationality, and aggregated detention counts, but they do not collect or publish deportation totals by religious affiliation; religion is not a standard administrative field in U.S. immigration removal datasets, so the sources cannot produce a figure for "Muslim" deportees [1] [2] [3]. This omission means any claim quoting a specific number would either rely on inference from nationality or on secondary estimates, neither of which appears in the materials provided. The absence of religion as a recorded variable is the central reason a direct count is unavailable.

2. What the official sources do provide — removals, detention, nationality trends

The 2021 Yearbook and related enforcement reports detail removals, apprehensions, and removals by country or region, offering nationality-based breakdowns and annual flow metrics rather than faith-based tallies [1] [3]. Analyses of removal rates by origin cover long-term trends through 2021 and highlight disparities by nationality and period, but they stop short of connecting those patterns to religious identity [2]. Therefore, one can track overall deportation volumes and which national-origin groups experience higher removal rates, but not the religious composition of those removals.

3. Recent enforcement context — detention surges and noncriminal detainees

Recent 2025 reporting in the supplied analysis reveals notable increases in ICE detention, including that immigrants with no criminal record formed the largest group in detention and that total detained populations rose sharply compared with earlier periods [4] [5]. These articles document the operational context for removals and detentions but do not disaggregate those detained or removed by religion. The enforcement surge provides important context: if deportations increased, they affected many groups, but the materials do not show whether Muslims were over- or under-represented among them.

4. Individual cases that raise concerns about targeting — illustrative, not statistical

The detention of a long-time Muslim community leader after a green-card denial is documented in the supplied materials and underscores individual instances that raise civil-liberties and community concerns [7]. Such reports are valuable for understanding potential patterns of enforcement and public reaction, but they cannot be extrapolated into population-level counts. The evidence in the dataset supports scrutiny of specific enforcement actions, yet it remains insufficient to establish aggregate figures for Muslim deportations.

5. Outside-context references in the dataset — why they don’t answer the question

The archive includes items about deportation in other countries and migration trends in Europe, such as Saudi Arabia’s mass removals and Italian migration reports, which are contextually informative but unrelated to U.S. deportation totals for Muslim immigrants [6] [8]. These sources illustrate the global practice of removals but do not bridge the specific U.S. data gap concerning religion. Their presence highlights the necessity of careful source selection when seeking religiously disaggregated deportation statistics.

6. How analysts could estimate the number — limitations and pitfalls

Estimating Muslim deportations would require indirect methods—matching country of origin and demographic surveys, or modeling based on national-origin and known religious demographics—but the supplied sources do not attempt such modeling. Any attempt to infer religion from nationality risks substantial misclassification because many national-origin groups are religiously mixed. The provided materials caution against overinterpreting nationality-based removal patterns as proxies for religious identity [2] [3].

7. Bottom line and what the supplied evidence supports

Based solely on the supplied sources, the correct conclusion is explicit: no verified count exists in these materials for how many Muslim immigrants were deported from the U.S. since 2021. The documents allow analysis of removal volumes, nationality-based disparities, detention trends, and illustrative enforcement cases, but they do not supply religion-disaggregated deportation data [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [7].

8. What would be needed to answer the question definitively

A definitive answer requires access to datasets that record deportees’ religious affiliation or high-quality linked survey data that can reliably infer religion at the individual level—neither are present in the materials provided. The supplied sources point to the types of official statistics and reporting one would examine for such an inquiry, but they also make clear the methodological barrier: the absence of religion as an administrative field prevents drawing a fact-based total from these documents alone [1] [3] [4].

Want to dive deeper?
What are the grounds for deporting Muslim immigrants from the US?
How does the US track the religious affiliation of deported immigrants?
Have there been any changes in deportation policies affecting Muslim immigrants since 2021?
Which countries have received the most Muslim deportees from the US since 2021?
What rights do Muslim immigrants have during the deportation process in the US?