US deportations by countries in the year 2025
Executive summary
Public sources disagree sharply on how many people the U.S. removed in 2025 and which nationalities were most affected: official DHS messaging claims more than 605,000 deportations since January 20, 2025 [1], independent analysts estimate between roughly 310,000 and 340,000 ICE removals for FY2025 [2] [3], and watchdogs and NGOs document intensive air removals and transfers that disproportionately hit Central American migrants and a widening set of origin countries [4] [5]. Government data systems that could provide a definitive country-by-country accounting exist — ICE’s removals tables and DHS’s OHSS monthly tables — but the excerpts provided here do not contain a complete, single-source country breakdown for calendar year 2025, and the statistics are reported in different ways that complicate direct comparisons [6] [7].
1. What the official sources say about country breakdowns and where to find them
ICE publicly publishes removals and “arrests by country of citizenship” tables that are designed to be broken out by country and by criminal-history categories, and those tables are the primary official source for country-by-country removals in 2025 — but the snippet set here does not include the actual country-by-country counts for the year, only the existence of those tables [6].
2. Contradictory totals — DHS vs. independent estimates
The Department of Homeland Security released a headline figure claiming “more than 605,000 deportations” since the administration took office in January 2025 [1], while independent researchers and economists using ICE releases and other datasets put the number of ICE-executed removals for FY2025 in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands: the Migration Policy Institute estimates about 340,000 deportations by ICE in FY2025 [3] and Brookings’ synthesis of multiple sources estimates roughly 310,000–315,000 removals for 2025 [2], reflecting differing methodologies and definitions of “deportation” versus voluntary departures and returns [2] [3].
3. Which countries appear most frequently in reporting and analysis
Multiple independent and secondary sources indicate heavy representation of Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) among removals and deportation operations in 2025, with at least one compendium claiming these three received more than half of deportations in a May 2025 snapshot; however, that claim comes from a non-government aggregator in the snippet set and needs validation from ICE’s country tables for a full year tally [5]. Migration Policy Institute and NGOs tracking flights also document expanded removals to many more countries beyond Mexico and the Northern Triangle in 2025, including repatriations and third‑country transfers [3] [4].
4. Why a single country-by-country definitive list is elusive in the available reporting
Data collection and reporting differences drive the ambiguity: DHS’s OHSS monthly tables count “immigration events” and may count individuals more than once in different tables, ICE’s internal coding has shifted making year-to-year comparisons difficult, and FOIA-derived datasets used by researchers contain gaps or missing identifiers — all of which mean that aggregate country tallies for 2025 can diverge depending on whether they include voluntary departures, expedited removals, third‑country returns, or repeat counts [7] [8].
5. What the reporting consensus implies and how to get the authoritative breakdown
The best-supported conclusion from the supplied sources is that hundreds of thousands of people were removed or left the U.S. as part of enforcement operations in 2025, with strong evidence of concentrated removals from Central America and an expansion of removals to a much broader set of origin countries; precise country-by-country totals for calendar year 2025 are accessible in ICE’s removals tables and DHS OHSS monthly tables but are not printed in the excerpts provided here, so consulting ICE’s statistical removals tables and OHSS monthly datasets is necessary for a definitive country list [6] [7] [4]. Independent trackers such as the Migration Policy Institute, Brookings analysts, Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor, and FOIA-based projects provide alternative tallies and useful breakdowns, and they should be compared side-by-side with ICE’s official country tables to reconcile methodological differences [3] [2] [4] [8].