How many deportation-related protests occurred nationwide between 2009 and 2016 and what were their typical sizes?
Executive summary
There is no reliable, contemporaneous national tally of deportation-related protests for 2009–2016 in the reporting provided, so a precise count cannot be produced from these sources; official datasets cited in the record focus on removals, not demonstrations [1] [2]. What can be established from the available material is that public demonstrations about deportation existed, ranged widely in scale from small local actions to rallies of thousands in later years, and that most systematic protest-tracking in the sources occurs after 2016 when demonstration activity surged [3] [4].
1. What the official records actually measure — and what they do not
Federal statistics collected and discussed in the provided sources concentrate on removals and enforcement numbers — for example, aggregated removals from FY2009–FY2016 totaling more than 2.7 million, as emphasized by the American Immigration Council and DHS tables [1] [2] — but these administrative datasets do not record protest events or crowd sizes, so they cannot answer how many deportation-related protests occurred nationwide between 2009 and 2016 [1] [2].
2. Scholarly and media tracking of demonstrations is intermittent and often post‑hoc
Independent trackers and media outlets documented spikes in immigration-related demonstrations well after 2016: a Princeton-tied brief maps a rise in immigration-related demonstrations in early 2025 and characterizes a record-high level of activity that year [3]. That kind of post‑2016 analytical work underscores the gap: systematic, comparable protest-count data for 2009–2016 are not present in the supplied reporting, so any national count would require different sources (academic protest databases or crowd-count consortiums) that are not in the packet [3].
3. Typical sizes — from small local actions to mass rallies, but no representative national average
The supplied sources illustrate the heterogeneity of protest sizes but do not offer a representative average for 2009–2016. Local reporting and encyclopedic summaries describe some demonstrations swelling to “several thousand” participants (example language appears in a page summarizing anti-deportation protests, though that entry covers events outside the 2009–2016 window and later surges) [4]. Conversely, contemporary reporting about confrontations with immigration agents in Minneapolis shows crowds of hundreds during incidents in 2026, demonstrating that protest size can cluster anywhere from dozens to thousands depending on local triggers and media attention [5] [4]. Because the reporting is episodic and skewed to high‑visibility events, it cannot yield a statistically valid “typical” crowd size for the 2009–2016 period.
4. Why journalists and researchers struggle to count protests retrospectively
Counting protests nationwide requires systematic event data collection (media scraping, crowd-counting protocols, or consolidated protest databases) that the provided materials do not supply; instead, the packet emphasizes enforcement metrics and selective accounts of later protests and confrontations [1] [3]. Where researchers have mapped demonstration trends (for instance, in 2025) they rely on purpose‑built incident datasets; absent those datasets for 2009–2016 in the supplied reporting, any national estimate of protest frequency would be speculative [3].
5. A cautious inference and research path forward
From the evidence given, the defensible conclusion is negative and precise: the supplied reporting does not contain a nationwide count of deportation-related protests for 2009–2016 nor a rigorous distribution of their sizes, and therefore it is not possible to state how many such protests occurred or to produce a reliable “typical” size based on these sources alone [1] [2] [3]. To get an answer would require consulting dedicated protest-event databases or contemporary news-archive aggregations for that eight‑year span, which are not included in the materials presented here.