Trump's Deportation Numbers, Explained

Yahoo

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A Jamaican man is detained by federal agents after his immigration court hearing at the Ted Weiss Federal Building in New York City on on June 9, 2025. Credit - Adam Gray—Getty Images
President Donald Trump campaigned on delivering the largest mass deportation effort in US history. What he has delivered so far is a dramatic surge in arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of people who were living in the U.S.
The data shows that interior enforcement has more than doubled since Trump took office, filling up immigration detention facilities across the country. It's those stepped-up efforts by ICE agents in workplaces, courthouses and homes to arrest people that prompted protests in Los Angeles last week. Trump's decision to deploy the California National Guard there over the objections of state and local officials sparked an escalation in protests and violent clashes with law enforcement over the weekend, according to local officials.
Trump's upswing in ICE arrests may be starting to yield a surge in deportations. The total number of deportations has stayed essentially level compared to the Biden era, until recently, when the numbers appear to have risen sharply.
Here's what the data shows about how the Trump Administration has revamped immigration enforcement and deportations in a few short months.
In Trump's first six months, the number of people being apprehended on the Southern Border has plummeted. Instead, an increasing share of those held in immigration detention are people who were arrested by ICE. The most recent ICE detention data shows the average number of people held has gone up 25% since Trump took office.
This represents a dramatic shift from how immigration enforcement has long been conducted in the U.S. Under the Biden administration, the majority of people who ended up in immigration detention were those who had recently crossed the border and were arrested by agents with Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). Holding border crossers in detention put them on a faster docket in removal proceedings, paving the way to send them out of the country at a faster clip.
One major reason for this shift away from CPB arrests is that fewer people are coming to the border illegally than they were during most of the Biden era.
Read more: Inside Donald Trump's Mass Deportation Operation
In a recent interview with TIME, Trump border czar Tom Homan said he would like to double the amount of bed space ICE has in detention from 50,000 to 100,000. Having more people held in detention centers could increase the pace of both ICE arrests and deportations.
Trump told TIME last year he wanted to target 15 million people for removal. He said he was open to using the military to do it, in the face of restrictions in the Posse Comitatus Act that limits the use of the military on U.S. soil. In a campaign interview with ABC News in August, J.D. Vance said, 'Let's start with 1 million.'
At the end of April, the Administration said it had deported more than 139,000 migrants, which was behind pace to reach their aggressive targets. That is a reflection of just how time-consuming and challenging it is to find and remove people living in communities. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security provided TIME with updated figures from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: more than 207,000 deported. That represents a significant increase in the Administration's deportations and may reflect the more sweeping and intrusive actions immigration officials have taken in recent weeks.
The total number of people being deported has basically been stable, if slightly up, even as an increasing portion are those arrested inside the US by ICE. In May, ICE increased the pace of removal fights, a sign that the number of deportations could increase at a faster rate in the coming months. The Trump administration has asked Congress for more funding to pay for deportations and an increased pace in immigration enforcement. The most recent version of the'Big Beautiful Bill' that Trump is pushing Congress to pass has $168 billion for immigration and border enforcement. That would be a five-fold increase in such funding over the current year, which Congress set at $33 billion.
Part of the challenge is finding places to accept deportees. Trump has defied long-standing norms and, some argue, broken laws by sending migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador and the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, while putting others on planes bound for Panama and South Sudan. Homan tells TIME the Administration is in talks with three more countries to accept U.S. deportees.
With the number of deportations not increasing as fast as they would like, Trump officials are pressuring ICE and other government agencies to boost immigration arrests.
They are also encouraging migrants in the U.S. to return to their home countries on their own. Trump has offered $1,000 and a free commercial flight to people willing to 'self deport.' But even with that incentive, immigrants aren't leaving the country at the pace Trump promised.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, says the Administration's self-deport campaign is unprecedented. 'Once they realized that fast deportation is not an easy enterprise, they started selling the idea of self deportation at a scale of which probably has not been detected in our history,' he says.
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