Immigration after one year under Trump: Where do mass deportation efforts stand?

In the year since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has taken dramatic actions to carry out his promise of the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history, including invoking rarely used laws and launching aggressive immigration enforcement in several U.S. cities.

Although deportation data is limited because the federal government has stopped releasing it, available figures show Trump remains far below his goal of deporting 1 million people a year.

Nevertheless, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute said in a Jan. 13 report that Trump’s actions have "dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants" and made the climate for immigrants in the U.S. illegally "more hostile." 

Trump’s promise to prioritize deporting the "worst of the worst" has also fallen short. About 74% of the nearly 70,000 immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention as of December, the most recent data available, have no criminal convictions.

Trump’s deportation efforts have been less efficient and more disruptive than those undertaken by other presidents, said University of North Carolina immigration law professor Rick Su.

The deportations have been "more sensational, intrusive, and focused on ‘low hanging fruit’ than not only past presidents, but even the first Trump administration," Su said.

When asked for  comment about the deportation operation, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, said Trump is "keeping his promise and the American people are appreciative." DHS did not respond to detailed questions about deportation data.

Here’s what the administration’s first-year efforts have encompassed.

Shackled migrants deplane an aircraft used for deportation flights at the Valley International Airport, Aug. 31, 2025, in Harlingen, Texas. (AP)

How many people have been deported under Trump?

Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration has not released monthly detailed deportation data. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security provides updates via press releases.

DHS said in a Dec. 10 press release that 605,000 people had been deported since Jan. 20, 2025, when Trump was inaugurated. But the lack of public data makes it impossible to know what that figure includes. For example, it could include people turned away at the U.S. border or at airports.

University of California Los Angeles researchers, through the Deportation Data Project, collect and publish immigration data received via Freedom of Information Act requests.

The project’s data shows around 350,000 deportations since Jan. 20, 2025. That number does not include people who were not arrested by ICE before being deported, such as people encountered by Border Patrol agents at the U.S. southern border.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, another research group that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to analyze government data, said that from January through September 2025, the Trump administration deported around 234,000 people.

DHS also cites another data point: people who left the country voluntarily. During Trump’s second term, DHS says, 1.9 million people self-deported. 

As with other deportation figures, DHS provided no evidence for this number. In September, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem said 1.6 million people had voluntarily left the U.S. under Trump. But that number came from one research group’s estimate based on a survey with a small sample size and large margin of error. And the figure represented not only people who might have voluntarily left the U.S., but also people who were deported, died or whose status changed such as by receiving asylum.

How does that compare with other administrations?

Deportations are generally a three-step process, said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. People are arrested, detained and then deported.

"In the last year, we've seen some parts of that deportation effort increase, while others have stayed the same," she said. For example, even though arrests and detentions increased, the administration hasn’t "reached that increase in deportations that they're looking for."

Overall, deportations under Trump are lower than deportations under former President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, who immigrant rights advocates dubbed the "deporter-in-chief." But the Trump administration’s limited data release makes it difficult to compare. 

During the last full fiscal year when Biden was in office, from October 2023 to September 2024, DHS deported about 778,000 people. Biden’s figure includes people deported at the border and people deported inside the U.S. Because of the high number of people who crossed the southern border under Biden, it’s likely that a large share of the deportations happened there. 

Obama deported around 962,000 people in fiscal year 2009, from October 2008 to September 2009. As with Biden’s data, that included deportations at the border and inside the U.S.

Vice President JD Vance called any comparison between Obama and Trump an "entirely fake" argument. 

"In the Obama administration, they counted being turned away at the border as a deportation," Vance said in a Jan. 14 post. "A person would show up, be sent back, and counted as a deportation."

Vance is correct that deportation data under past presidents did include people sent back at the border. It’s likely that Trump’s data includes those numbers too. That said, under Trump, Border Patrol encounters with people trying to illegally enter the U.S. have significantly dropped, so Trump’s deportation data is likely to include fewer removals at the border.

Tear gas is deployed Jan. 13 in Minneapolis amid protesters near the scene where Renee Good was fatally shot Jan. 7 by an ICE officer. (AP)

What actions has Trump taken so far?

Among the most high-profile of Trump’s deportation efforts was his use of the centuries old Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without due process. The law lets the president detain and deport people from a "hostile nation or government" without a hearing when the U.S. is either at war with that country or the country has "perpetrated, attempted, or threatened" an invasion against the U.S. It has been used only three times in U.S. history, each during wartime.

Trump has sent large numbers of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents to carry out wide-ranging operations in cities including Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, North Carolina and New Orleans. 

Each city has had instances of masked federal agents in military gear raiding workplaces, tackling immigrants and bystanders and releasing tear gas in crowds. Federal agents have fatally shot several people, including U.S. citizen Renee Good Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.

The administration’s actions have resulted in several ongoing lawsuits related to agents’ tactics and the legality of deploying National Guard troops.

Trump has also focused on arresting and deporting people at scheduled ICE check-ins or immigration court hearings — people who are following immigration requirements. 

RELATED: Trump promised mass deportations. Where does that stand six months into his administration?

What will it take to reach 1 million deportations a year?

Trump has aimed to expand the administration’s immigration enforcement capacity. As part of his signature tax and spending bill, Congress allocated $170 billion in immigration enforcement funding. That includes $45 billion for immigration detention and nearly $30 billion for ICE to increase deportations and hire more immigration agents.

In the past year, DHS has hired 12,000 ICE agents. The rush to onboard more agents has led the agency to cut training for the new hires in half.

The administration has also let federal officials in other agencies enforce immigration law, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service. 

Even so, deporting 1 million people a year would require even more effort.

"There would need to be a lot more door-to-door raids and checkpoints, and detention capacity," Su said. "It would also require that all Americans — citizens and otherwise — to be subject to constant surveillance and checking of status."