What are the official annual deportation totals for fiscal years 2021–2024 from DHS/ICE/CBP?
Executive summary
Official annual deportation totals for fiscal years 2021–2024 are reported by DHS components — chiefly the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — but the specific source documents and dashboards must be consulted to extract exact year-by-year counts; the materials available in this reporting package summarize trends (including large numbers of “returns” at the border) but do not provide a single consolidated table in the supplied snippets that lists the precise FY2021–FY2024 totals (OHSS/ICE/CBP are the authoritative sources) [1] [2].
1. What the government publishes and where to look
DHS’s OHSS publishes the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics and monthly enforcement tables that are the official repositories for annual counts of removals and returns; ICE’s ERO dashboards and ICE press-statements provide operational removal counts and quarterly totals; CBP publishes border encounter and “repatriation/expulsion” data — together these component sources constitute the official record and should be cited for precise annual totals [1] [3] [2].
2. What the available reporting demonstrates about scale and trends
Independent analyses and DHS excerpts in the provided materials show deportation activity on the order of hundreds of thousands per year during 2021–2024, driven heavily by returns/expulsions at the southwest border rather than interior removals; Migration Policy notes DHS carried out an average of roughly 352,000 deportations per year in FY2020–24 and highlights that most deportations in the Biden-era years were returns at the border rather than ICE interior removals [4].
3. Border returns vs. interior removals — why totals jump around
The published materials stress a shift toward rapid administrative returns and expulsions (including Title 42-era expulsions and other border-authority returns), which inflate yearly deportation counts because returns are faster and more numerous than interior removals; Migration Policy reports that ICE interior removals averaged much lower (about 38,000 in FY2021–24), while border-related deportations surged — for example, ICE reported nearly 68,000 ERO removals in the third quarter of FY2024 alone, illustrating the seasonally and operationally driven swings [4] [5].
4. Representative figures and corroborating snapshots
Public analyses and data snapshots in the reporting package provide partial figures: Migration Policy’s synthesis cites an average of 352,000 deportations per year for FY2020–24 and documents that administrative returns exceeded 505,000 from FY2021 through February 2024, while a contemporary aggregator (USAFacts) reported several-hundred-thousand repatriations and cited roughly 312,000 removals as of November 2024 — these numbers corroborate that annual totals are in the high‑hundreds of thousands when returns and expulsions are included [4] [6] [7].
5. Caveats, discrepancies and why exact FY totals require consulting the primary tables
Definitions matter: “removals” (compelled departures under an order) and “returns” or “repatriations” (administrative or voluntary departures, expulsions) are counted differently across OHSS, ICE, and CBP tables; OHSS notes methodological standardization and warns about differences in component reporting and as‑of dates — therefore extracting a definitive FY2021–FY2024 row of totals requires pulling the Yearbook/OHSS tables and the ICE ERO dashboards directly to ensure consistent definitions and as‑of cutoffs [8] [3] [1].
6. Bottom line and how to get the authoritative year-by-year numbers
The authoritative annual deportation totals for FY2021, FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024 are available in DHS’s OHSS Yearbook tables and ICE’s ERO statistics dashboard; the materials summarized here confirm the overall magnitude (hundreds of thousands annually, with a large share from border returns) but do not contain a single consolidated table in the provided snippets with each fiscal year’s final count — consult OHSS Yearbook 2021–2024 tables and the ICE ERO statistics dashboard for exact, component‑by‑component FY totals [9] [2] [3].