How many illegals deported in 2025?
Executive summary
Official tallies and independent estimates for 2025 diverge sharply: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly claimed government operations produced more than 605,000 deportations and roughly 1.9 million voluntary “self-deportations,” totaling its headline figure of about 2.5 million people leaving the U.S. in 2025 [1] [2] [3]. Independent researchers and watchdogs, using narrower definitions and different data sources, place formal removals much lower—most estimates cluster between roughly 310,000 and 340,000 deportations for the year [4] [5].
1. DHS’s headline and how it was constructed
DHS issued a running series of press releases touting milestones—1.6 million “left” in 200 days, 2 million in 250 days, and ultimately “more than 2.5 million” people leaving the U.S. in 2025, with the agency stating that enforcement produced “more than 605,000 deportations” and about 1.9 million voluntary departures [6] [3] [1] [2]. Those DHS releases combine distinct categories: formal removals carried out by ICE/CBP and large counts interpreted as voluntary exits or “self-deportations,” a mixture that produces the large cumulative number DHS markets to the public [1] [2].
2. Independent estimates focused on formal removals
Policy researchers and data projects that parse formal removals reach much lower totals: Brookings notes DHS’s 2.5 million claim appears to sum an estimated 1.9 million figure from the Current Population Survey with a measure of removals, and Brookings’ own review estimates about 310,000–315,000 removals in 2025 [4]. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI), working from publicly available federal figures, estimates ICE conducted about 340,000 deportations in FY2025, a figure that explicitly counts formal removals and certain voluntary departures tied to detention [5].
3. Court orders, removal orders and the administrative pipeline
Court-level activity complicates any single tally: TRAC reports that immigration judges issued roughly 528,333 removal and voluntary departure orders through September 2025—illustrating that orders issued by courts are not identical to removals executed by agencies, since many ordered removals are delayed, stayed, or not enforced during appeals and litigation [7]. DHS’s enforcement totals and press releases emphasize operational arrests and departures, while removal-order counts from courts capture the adjudicative side; both are factual but different slices of the system [2] [7].
4. Why the gap exists and critiques of the large DHS numbers
Scholars and watchdogs caution DHS’s sweeping totals rely on problematic interpretations—particularly the use of CPS-based population changes to claim millions “self-deported”—and conflate voluntary departures, reduced inflows, removals, and statistical noise into a single headline [8] [4]. Analysts at Brookings and other centers flag that CPS population estimates are imperfect for undocumented counts and that counting “left” without tracking legal status or movement reasons inflates claims tied to enforcement [4] [8].
5. Best evidence-based answer and caveats
The most defensible, evidence-based reading is this: for calendar/FY 2025, independent analysts estimate formal removals by ICE and related agencies in the ballpark of roughly 310,000–340,000 persons [4] [5]. DHS’s public-facing totals—527,000–605,000 deportations in some releases and a 2.5 million figure when adding alleged self-deportations—reflect broader, agency-defined measures that include voluntary departures and CPS-based estimates that many experts call unreliable for counting undocumented departures [2] [1] [8]. Reporting must therefore distinguish “formal deportations/removals” (best-estimate ~310k–340k) from DHS’s aggregated “removed or self-deported” totals (claims ranging into the millions), and note that removal orders, enforcement actions, and population-estimate methodologies each tell different, sometimes conflicting, parts of the same story [7] [2] [4].