What portion of Trump‑era deportations were Title 42 expulsions versus formal ICE interior removals (FY2017–FY2020)?
Executive summary
From FY2017 through FY2019, the vast bulk of government‑counted deportation actions under the Trump administration were formal removals and enforcement returns rather than Title 42 expulsions, because the public‑health Title 42 authority was not used until March 2020; interior removals in those years were measurable (but below the peak years of the 2000s) and never exceeded roughly 100,000 in annual interior removals through 2019 [1]. Title 42 expulsions only began in March 2020, so while they contribute to FY2020 totals they represent a small or emerging share of the four‑year FY2017–FY2020 window; available reporting does not publish a single, source‑verified tally that allows an exact percentage split of Title 42 expulsions versus formal ICE interior removals for FY2017–FY2020 [2] [3] [1].
1. Why the question is tricky: definitions, agencies and reporting differences
The federal statistics landscape treats removals, enforcement returns, administrative returns and expulsions differently; many analysts and news outlets treat “deportations” variably — Migration Policy defines deportation as removals plus enforcement returns, while Title 42 expulsions were labeled “expulsions” or “repatriations” rather than removals in much reporting [4] [3]. ICE’s public dashboard and CBP’s Title 42 reports are separate datasets, and ICE itself notes that its “Title 42 expulsions” table represents only flights carried out by ICE and points readers to CBP for comprehensive Title 42 data — a fragmentation that makes an apples‑to‑apples FY2017–FY2020 split difficult without reconciling two agency feeds [2].
2. What the sources do show about formal ICE (interior) removals in FY2017–FY2020
Independent analysis and ICE summaries indicate that interior removals rose relative to the immediate pre‑Trump years but remained well below the 2008–2012 highs; interior removals in 2017–2019 never exceeded about 100,000 per year in the public analyses available [1]. More granular reporting cites total ICE removals in FY2017 on the order of the low‑to‑mid hundreds of thousands when border removals are included, with ICE removals dropping in 2020 amid the pandemic to around 122,000 for that fiscal year according to one compilation [5] [1].
3. What the sources show about Title 42 expulsions during this period
Title 42 — a public‑health authority used to expel border crossers without standard immigration processing — was invoked in March 2020, and large Title 42 expulsion totals are primarily documented from that point forward; Migration Policy highlights the scale of Title 42 expulsions across the pandemic period (March 2020–May 2023), but the bulk of the three million expulsions it cites occurred after the FY2017–FY2020 window and largely under the Biden administration rather than during Trump’s earlier years [4]. ICE’s own guidance makes clear that comprehensive Title 42 numbers are maintained by CBP and that ICE’s published Title 42 flight data are only a subset, meaning public ICE tables do not capture the full universe of expulsions necessary to compute an exact FY2020 share [2].
4. Bottom line estimate and caveats
Given that Title 42 did not exist as an operational expulsions tool until March 2020, the four‑year period FY2017–FY2020 was dominated by conventional removals and enforcement returns for FY2017–FY2019, and only a partial FY2020 exposure to Title 42 expulsions occurred [1] [5] [2]. Because ICE and CBP publish expulsions and removals in separate — not fully reconciled — datasets and because public analyses classify “deportations” differently, the sources provided do not support producing a single, authoritative percentage split of “what portion” of FY2017–FY2020 deportation‑era departures were Title 42 expulsions versus formal ICE interior removals; the best defensible characterization from these sources is that formal removals constituted the dominant share of deportation‑style actions in FY2017–FY2019 and Title 42 expulsions began contributing to FY2020 totals after March 2020 [1] [2] [4].
5. Political framing and reporting incentives
Advocates, think tanks and newsrooms often conflate “deportations,” “removals” and “expulsions” for emphasis: some outlets emphasize large removal counts to portray aggressive interior enforcement [1], while other analyses focus on Title 42’s massive expulsions during the pandemic to critique border policy [4]. ICE’s split reporting and CBP’s separate Title 42 dataset create an information environment that can be selectively cited to advance policy or political narratives; the primary hidden agenda in many debates is whether to count expulsions as “deportations” — a definitional choice that substantially alters the apparent scale of any administration’s enforcement record [3] [2].