980,000 Deportations In 18 Months; Four In Five Had No Criminal Conviction, Analysis Finds

About 980,000 people were deported from the United States in the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, and only about 190,000 of them — 20 percent — had a criminal conviction, according to an analysis published Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute. The analysis, by Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics, was built from DHS records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, other public records and data from the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. The reconstruction was necessary, the institute says, because DHS stopped publishing its monthly deportation statistics in January 2025.

What the 980,000 counts matters. It is not formal removals alone: about 580,000 (59 percent) were removals carried out under removal orders; about 300,000 (30 percent) were enforcement returns; and about 110,000 (11 percent) were administrative returns — a total that includes border turnbacks and departures arranged outside formal removal proceedings, among them a record roughly 170,000 cases in which ICE granted voluntary departure or return. On a removals-only basis, the institute calculates an annual pace of roughly 380,000 — below the record 432,334 removals in fiscal 2013.

The conviction figure is computed across all deportation types. Among formal removals only, 31 percent had a conviction — still below the 44 percent average recorded in fiscal years 2009 through 2021. The most common convictions were for illegal entry or re-entry and for traffic offenses, including DUI. “These data do not show that the administration is deporting the worst of the worst,” Rosenblum said, adding that even among people with convictions, records more often involved immigration or traffic infractions than violent or other serious crimes.

Most deportations still start at the border: 69 percent resulted from border encounters — roughly 340,000 people turned back by CBP and another 340,000 arrested at the border and later deported by ICE — against about 300,000 first arrested inside the country. But the interior share is rising, from 28 percent of deportations in 2025 to 34 percent in the first half of 2026 and 39 percent in July 2026, with interior-arrest deportations climbing from about 8,000 a month in early 2025 to about 19,000 a month by mid-2026. Among ICE deportations of people who had lived in the United States at least two years — about 390,000 people, 61 percent of the ICE total — 71 percent had no criminal conviction; about 90,000 of the deported had lived in the country more than a decade.

The pace: about 620,000 deportations in the first year of the term and an estimated 660,000 in the fiscal year that ended September 30 — the institute’s estimate, since its records run through July 31, 2026. That is 26 percent above the 2021–2024 yearly average, and well short of the administration’s stated goal of one million deportations a year. It is also far below the 1.86 million removals-plus-returns recorded in fiscal 2000. Congress has approved $240 billion in immigration-enforcement funding through fiscal 2029, enough for ICE to hire 12,000 additional officers.

The administration publishes different numbers, on different definitions. Two days before the analysis appeared, the White House put its own tally at nearly 1.2 million people “deported or removed” over a period it did not specify. The administration has also said more than 3 million undocumented immigrants have left the country since January 2025, including an estimated 2.2 million voluntary “self-departures” — a figure the institute treats cautiously: Rosenblum estimates self-departures by people who had lived in the United States at least a year at somewhere between 310,000 and 1.5 million, a range resting partly on Mexican census data and survey trends that critics say may partly reflect people avoiding government surveys. Border czar Tom Homan said on October 1: “Mass deportation is happening.” No DHS statement responding specifically to the institute’s report had appeared as of Friday morning.

The institute’s figures are estimates rebuilt from FOIA releases and partial public data, not an official tally — the gap created when the government stopped publishing monthly statistics is itself part of the report.

Sources: Migration Policy Institute analysis by Marc Rosenblum (October 22, 2026), as reported by Reuters and The Associated Press; Department of Homeland Security statements.