Numbef of deportations per year
Executive summary
Official U.S. government reporting and independent analysts show that "deportations" vary widely depending on how the term is defined—removals ordered by courts, voluntary returns at the border, and pandemic-era expulsions are all counted differently—yet recent aggregate figures put annual removals and returns in the low hundreds of thousands, with DHS components (CBP + ICE) averaging about 352,000 actions per year in FY2020–FY2024 and ICE alone averaging roughly 146,000 per year over that span [1]. Data discontinuities, shifting counting rules, and separate agency records mean any single headline number must be read with caution [2] [3].
1. What the headline numbers actually measure
The Department of Homeland Security and analysts distinguish removals (compulsory, ordered departures) from returns or expulsions (often administrative or at the border), and those methodological differences drive large swings in annual totals; DHS’s reporting system is the statistical record but has changed field availability and counting conventions in recent years, which affects year-to-year comparability [2] [4]. Migration Policy Institute (MPI) aggregates DHS component output and reports that DHS carried out an average of 352,000 deportations per year in FY2020–FY2024, explicitly combining CBP and ICE actions to reflect the full scope of government removals and returns [1].
2. ICE versus CBP: two agencies, two roles, different totals
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) is responsible for interior removals and reported an average of about 146,000 removals annually in FY2020–FY2024, while CBP—operating at the border—accounted for the larger share of total DHS actions as many encounters at the southwest border are processed by CBP and result in rapid returns or expulsions rather than interior court-ordered removals [1] [3]. MPI and DHS data show interior ICE removals have trended down over the past 15 years even as CBP removals tied to border encounters rose sharply in recent years, with ICE interior removals falling from averages above 150,000 in earlier periods to much lower figures in FY2021–FY2024 [1].
3. Recent annual totals and notable single-year counts
Media and data projects using DHS releases reported very different single-year pictures: some sources show roughly 1.1 million repatriations in 2023 when broader definitions including mass border expulsions are used (a USAFacts aggregation notes 1.1M repatriations in 2023) while MPI’s synthesis of FY2020–FY2024 data centers on a 352,000 annual average for DHS components across those fiscal years [5] [1]. Independent analysts caution that peaks of roughly 400,000 deportations in earlier years—such as the high interior-removal years during the Obama administration—reflect different mixes of interior removals and border returns compared with recent years [6].
4. Why comparisons across years mislead without context
Year-to-year comparisons are often misleading because policy shifts (prioritizing interior arrests versus border expulsions), statutory changes, and temporary public-health expulsions (e.g., pandemic-era Title 42 practices) change the composition of the counts; DHS itself revised reporting fields beginning in mid‑2024 and uses a "Persist" dataset to deduplicate and standardize component inputs, which can retroactively affect trend lines [2]. Analysts such as MPI and Econofact stress that aggregate deportation statistics conflate very different actions—expulsions of recent border crossers versus interior removals of long-term noncitizens—and thus have distinct legal and social implications [1] [6].
5. Limits of available reporting and open questions
Public sources provide detailed DHS component tables and independent summaries, but gaps remain for real‑time, fully reconciled national totals and for separating voluntary returns from legally ordered removals in certain releases; ICE cautions that quarterly and year-end tallies are subject to revision and that public dashboards are published with a lag and with data-locking at fiscal-year close [3] [2]. Given those constraints, the most defensible statement from available reporting is that DHS-level enforcement actions averaged roughly 352,000 per year in FY2020–FY2024, with ICE responsible for about 146,000 annually over the same period, and that single-year headline counts can be much higher or lower depending on inclusion criteria [1].