How many immigrants have been deported by Trump per year?
Executive summary
The number of immigrants deported under President Trump’s second term is contested: official Department of Homeland Security (DHS) releases boast several hundred thousand removals in the administration’s first year, while independent analysts and reporters offer lower and more granular estimates — producing a credible range from roughly 290,000 to as high as about 675,000 deportations in year one depending on definitions and data sources [1] [2] [3]. Differences in counting methods, inclusion of border expulsions versus interior removals, and DHS’s use of publicity-minded aggregates explain most of the divergence [4] [5].
1. Official tallies: DHS’s high-end, headline numbers
DHS repeatedly issued press statements claiming that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens were “removed” in the administration’s first year, at times using figures such as “more than 527,000,” “more than 605,000,” “622,000,” and even “more than 675,000” deportations as part of public messaging about enforcement successes [6] [7] [4] [1]. Those DHS releases also paired these removal figures with very large counts of so-called “self-deportations” or voluntary departures — statistics DHS used to portray a larger migration reduction tied to policy pressure and incentive programs like the CBP Home app [6] [7] [1].
2. Independent and investigative tallies: smaller, more cautious totals
Analysts working with ICE and Office of Homeland Security Statistics data have produced materially smaller totals. TRAC’s aggregation of reported ICE removals for FY2025 and FY2026 together yields about 290,603 removals attributable to the administration in those fiscal periods — a figure that directly contradicts DHS’s higher headline claims and that reflects removals as ICE reports them to oversight analysts [2]. Journalistic analysis by The New York Times, using federal data and classifications, estimated roughly 230,000 interior arrests leading to removals plus about 270,000 border removals — roughly 500,000 deportations in the first year — and explicitly flagged differences in how “removals,” “returns,” and Title 42 expulsions are categorized [3].
3. Why the numbers diverge: definitions, timing, and political framing
The discrepancies stem from several technical and political choices: whether to count voluntary “self-deportations” or incentive-driven returns as deportations, whether to include Title 42 expulsions or only formal “removals,” whether DHS’s public totals aggregate across subagencies and timeframes, and how much raw agency press releases are treated as statistical reporting versus political messaging [4] [5] [8]. Reporting and advocacy organizations warn that DHS has curtailed the routine publication of detailed monthly OHSS tables that previous administrations used, complicating outside verification and enabling large headline totals to stand unparsed [5] [9].
4. Best-available, bounded answer to “How many immigrants have been deported by Trump per year?”
There is no single uncontested per-year number in the public record provided here; instead the best-supported conclusion is a bounded estimate: independent analyses place removals in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands for the administration’s first year (TRAC at ~290,603 and The New York Times at ~500,000), while DHS’s own public statements range from roughly 527,000 up to claims of more than 675,000 removals depending on the press release [2] [3] [6] [1]. Therefore, the defensible reporting range for deportations in President Trump’s first year back in office is approximately 290,000–675,000, with variation driven largely by inclusion rules and data publication choices [2] [1] [3].
5. What this means for interpretation and further inquiry
Readers should treat DHS’s headline removal totals as political messaging unless cross-checked against raw OHSS/ICE monthly removals data or independent compilations; researchers and reporters using these numbers must specify whether they mean ICE “removals,” CBP expulsions, or voluntary departures, because conflating these categories inflates comparability and can turn administrative action into rhetorical high ground [4] [5] [8]. Independent counts and journalistic reconstructions provide necessary granularity but also carry limitations when agencies withhold month-by-month tables, leaving credible uncertainty about exact per-year deportation totals [2] [3].