Where does President Donald Trump’s mass deportation promise stand one year into his administration?

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. One year since taking office for his second term, Trump has taken dramatic actions, including invoking rarely used laws and launching aggressive immigration enforcement in several U.S. cities.

But the limited available deportation data shows Trump remains far below his goal of deporting 1 million people a year.

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. 

Immigration experts have raised questions about the data's accuracy. The lack of transparency 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 FOIA 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 voluntarily left the country. 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. We rated that Half True. 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.

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, New Orleans and Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Each city has seen 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.

The Trump administration has taken several steps to advance his mass deportations promise and is showing no signs of backing away from it. However, based on available data, Trump still hasn't hit his goal of 1 million deportations a year. We rate this promise In the Works.

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