US deportations by country during Donald Trump's second term
Executive summary
A precise, country-by-country accounting of deportations during Donald Trump’s second term is not available in the materials provided; however, government dashboards and independent analyses establish the broad contours: removals continue to concentrate on Mexico and the three northern Central American countries, the U.S. is repatriating people to scores of nations, and headline totals can mask differing definitions (removals, returns, repatriations) that shape political claims [1] [2] [3].
1. The big picture: volumes, destinations, and data sources
ICE and DHS report deportation activity in multiple dashboards and monthly tables that track arrests, detentions, removals, returns and repatriations, but those datasets use different categories and cutoffs, so “deportations by country” must be constructed from the underlying dashboards rather than a single prepackaged table; ICE’s public Enforcement and Removal Operations dashboards and DHS’s OHSS monthly tables are the primary official sources cited by analysts [2] [4].
2. Which countries receive the largest shares: Mexico and northern Central America dominate
Independent research and government summaries show a persistent concentration of interior deportations among a handful of nationalities—between FY2021–24, Mexican nationals accounted for roughly 63 percent of interior removals and northern Central Americans another 24 percent—an enduring pattern driven in part by repatriation agreements and practical ability to effect returns [1].
3. Geographic breadth: deportations go to many countries, including “recalcitrant” ones
ICE reported removals and returns to scores of countries; in FY2024 removals went to 192 countries, a likely record, underscoring that U.S. enforcement touches nearly every region even while most volume clusters in North/Central America; ICE also maintains a list of 15 “recalcitrant” countries that accept few or no returnees, naming China, Cuba, India and Venezuela among them [1] [5].
4. How headline totals can mislead: removals vs. returns vs. repatriations
Observers warn that raw counts touted by administrations can combine different actions—formal removals carried out by ICE, “enforcement returns” processed by CBP at the border, and broader repatriations or expulsions—so political claims about how many people were “deported” during a period can be apples-to-oranges unless the categories are disaggregated; analysts have demonstrated that different slices of DHS and ICE data produce divergent aggregate totals [3].
5. What available post-2024 reporting suggests about a second Trump term pattern
Recent press reconstructions and databases assembled after the 2024 election indicate very large overall removal totals in the 2023–24 period and that monthly deportation rates rose for many nationalities; one major news analysis framed deportation totals running into the hundreds of thousands across 2023–24 and described increases in both criminal and non‑criminal removals, but that reporting relies on extrapolations and the same mixed-category data that complicates cross-term comparisons [6] [7].
6. Caveats, contested narratives and where to go for country-level detail
Scholars and watchdogs emphasize limitations: ICE’s ERO dashboards and DHS OHSS tables provide the raw place-to-place detail needed to compile country-by-country counts but require careful parsing of fiscal-year definitions and of which agency (ICE vs. CBP) effected the return; critics also note political incentives to inflate or obscure categories in public statements about deportation tallies [2] [4] [3]. The sources provided do not include a fully assembled, authoritative country-by-country list explicitly labeled “Trump second term deportations,” so constructing that requires downloading ICE/OHSS datasets and reconciling removals, returns and repatriations in the timeframe of interest [2] [4].