The Trump administration is on pace to deport about 660,000 people in fiscal year 2026, short of its promise of one million deportations annually. The Migration Policy Institute released the estimate Thursday, October 22, 2026.
The fiscal year ended September 30. The administration’s pace remains below its stated target.
The Department of Homeland Security completed about 980,000 deportations during the first 18 months of the second Trump term, from January 20, 2025, through July 31, 2026. The count includes formal removals and returns.
Congress provided billions of dollars for immigration enforcement as the administration made its annual goal. The tally also shows a rise over recent years, alongside a sharp divide between border and interior enforcement.
Doris Meissner, director of MPI’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, said the analysis helps clarify trends as the government directs more resources and policy attention toward arrests and deportations.
“At a time when unprecedented resources and policy attention are being directed at increasing arrests and deportations, this analysis fills a critical gap in understanding immigration enforcement trends”
Most deportations still start at the border, though interior enforcement is rising
About 69% of the deportations involved unauthorized immigrants first intercepted at the U.S.-Mexico border. Roughly 680,000 people were turned around there or arrested at the border and deported after processing. About 300,000 were arrested inside the country.
The interior share rose as the monthly pace of deportations tied to those arrests more than doubled. Detention records also showed more than 50,000 monthly arrests in each of three consecutive months.
| Measure | Earlier figure | Later figure |
|---|---|---|
| Share of deportations tied to interior arrests | 28% in 2025 | 39% by July 2026 |
| Monthly deportations resulting from interior arrests | 8,000 in the first three months of the second Trump term | 19,000 between May and July 2026 |
Marc Rosenblum, the report’s author, said border encounters still produce most deportations, even as interior enforcement grows.
“Despite everything happening inside the country, most deportations are still the result of encounters at the border”
Among ICE deportations, excluding people turned around at the border, 61%, or 390,000 people, had lived in the United States for at least two years. Another 15%, or 90,000 people, had been in the country for 10 or more years.
Most deportees had no criminal conviction, while voluntary departures climbed
Only 20%, or 190,000, of the 980,000 ICE and CBP deportations involved a noncitizen convicted of a crime. A separate measure found convicted people accounted for 31% of removals, compared with an average 44% criminality rate for FY2009–2021.
The report found that 71%, or about 280,000, of those deported after living in the United States for at least two years had no criminal conviction. Among people who had lived in the country for at least 10 years, 61%, or 57,000, had no conviction.
Illegal entry or re-entry made up 23% of convictions among criminal removals. Traffic offenses, including driving under the influence, accounted for 21%.
Rosenblum said the findings did not show that the administration was deporting “the worst of the worst.” Even among people with convictions, he said, records were more likely to involve immigration or traffic infractions than violent or other serious crimes.
“These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst.”
About 170,000 people chose voluntary departure after Trump returned to office. They give up their immigration court cases and agree to leave, a number MPI described as an all-time high and a break with the pre-COVID-19-pandemic period.
Some people who agree to voluntary departure may later return to the United States. Immigrant advocates and lawyers say others give up their court cases to get out of ICE detention.
FOIA data fills a gap in the public enforcement record
DHS stopped publicly releasing detailed monthly reports covering ICE and Customs and Border Protection arrests and deportations in January 2025. MPI assembled its figures from public data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, including records gathered by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California.
Rosenblum is an MPI visiting senior fellow and former executive director of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics. He joined DHS in 2016 and led the statistics office beginning in 2023. He resigned in July after describing the administration’s approach as a “war on immigrants.”
Departure estimates vary, while spending and enforcement promises remain under scrutiny
DHS claimed earlier this year that more than 2.2 million people had “self-deported,” apparently relying on surveys showing a decline in the immigrant population. Critics of the figure say immigrants may instead be avoiding government surveys.
Rosenblum estimated that between 310,000 and 1.5 million people left on their own, excluding people with formal voluntary-departure agreements. The estimate covers people who had lived in the United States for at least one year, including legal immigrants and people living unlawfully in the country. It uses Mexican census data on returning citizens to estimate a plausible number of departures among other nationalities.
The administration has devoted about $240 billion to its immigration agenda. Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as DHS secretary in March 2026, promising more efficient and less conspicuous ICE arrests.
During Mullin’s tenure, Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araújo died in Texas and Colombian national Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero died in Maine at the hands of agents. Shootings also wounded other migrants. Raids became less conspicuous as arrests rose.
Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, spoke at a Hispanic leadership event near Miami on October 1, 2026. The America First Policy Institute sponsored the event. Homan said September would be the highest-deportation month in ICE history and claimed the country had arrested more people than ever before.
Court backlogs and complex cases remain obstacles to faster removals
The report points to a wider range of countries of origin as one challenge: deporting people from more countries can complicate removals. Immigration courts also face significant case backlogs, and those courts ultimately decide whether someone can be removed.
A 2026 Florida Law Review article by Peter L. Markowitz and Mauricio Noroña, “Who Decides Who Gets Deported?”, 78 Fla. L. Rev. 87 (2026), examined how enforcement priorities set by agency leaders can diverge from decisions by line-level officers and immigration prosecutors. The authors wrote that leadership guidelines have frequently been ignored, producing a policy that has often, but not always, diverged from political leadership’s priorities.
The authors also wrote that even one million annual deportations would leave most of the 14 million undocumented immigrants untouched. Homan ended his October remarks with a forecast: “Wait until you see what we do next year”
