What geographic U.S. regions and localities saw the highest numbers of deportations under Obama?
Executive summary
The highest volumes of deportations during the Obama years concentrated not in a single city or county but in two overlapping geographies: border enforcement along the U.S.–Mexico southern frontier (driven by CBP apprehensions and returns) and the U.S. interior where ICE removals—amplified by programs linking local jails to federal databases—produced large numbers of formal removals (MPI; Pew; Econofact) [1][2][3].
1. A bifurcated geography: border sectors and interior removals
Analysts make a clear distinction between actions that begin with Customs and Border Protection at the border and those initiated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement inside the country; under Obama both theaters produced high numbers but for different reasons — border sectors recorded large numbers of apprehensions and returns while interior removals climbed because of targeted enforcement and expanded data-sharing with local law enforcement (Econofact; MPI) [3][1].
2. The southern border: spikes in apprehensions and fiscal-year highs
Fiscal-year data show the administration presided over some of the largest single-year totals in the modern era — notably FY2013’s record 438,421 removals — a figure that reflected large border flows as well as interior activity and that sits at the center of claims about Obama-era “record deportations” (Pew) [2].
3. Inside the country: jails, Secure Communities, and national reach
The interior removals picture is national more than local: policies such as Secure Communities and its successor programs expanded biometric screening in jails and prisons, enabling ICE to identify and remove noncitizens from hundreds of jurisdictions; DHS reported expansion of the program from a small number of jurisdictions to more than 660, including all Southwest border jurisdictions, which funneled a steady stream of interior removals (DHS; MPI) [4][1].
4. Regional concentrations implied by enforcement patterns, not precise counts
Available reporting ties the heaviest enforcement to areas with large undocumented populations and to jurisdictions that participated in Secure Communities or similar data-sharing—this implies metropolitan regions in states with big immigrant populations (for example Southwest and other high-immigrant states), but the sources do not provide a complete, source-by-source breakdown by city or county in the supplied documents, so any claim of a specific city being “the top deporter” would exceed what these reports substantiate (MPI; Econofact) [1][3].
5. Policy design shaped geography: priority guidance and fast-track removals
Enforcement memos and practices narrowed ICE priorities toward recent border crossers and people with criminal records, producing concentrated campaigns in jurisdictions where those populations were encountered and where local booking systems fed federal databases; simultaneously, the rise of nonjudicial “expedited” removals meant many expulsions happened without full immigration-court proceedings, accelerating removal counts across multiple localities (ACLU; Leitf) [5][6].
6. Peaks, politics, and interpretive frames
Advocates and critics read the geography differently: immigrant-rights groups emphasize the national scope and disproportionate impacts on metropolitan immigrant communities and families, while enforcement advocates point to concentrated removals of criminal aliens and recent crossers as evidence of targeted policy; both interpretations are grounded in the same DHS-era figures showing interior removals were particularly high in Obama’s first term and that FY2012–2013 were peak years (ACLU; Pew; Econofact) [5][2][3].
7. Reporting limitations and what’s missing from these sources
The supplied sources establish the broad geographic contours—border sectors plus interior removals amplified by jail-to-federal data-sharing—but do not supply a complete, granular dataset mapping removals to individual counties, metros, or states in a way that would allow ranking localities by deportation counts; that data exists in DHS and TRAC databases but was not provided here, so any precise city- or county-level ranking cannot be produced from these documents alone (MPI; TRAC referenced) [1][7].