The Department of Homeland Security rejected a Migration Policy Institute analysis of President Donald Trump’s deportations on October 25, 2026, calling it “FAKE NEWS.” The department also credited Trump with a steep drop in illegal immigration.
In a post on X, DHS said the United States had recorded 17 months with zero releases of migrants at the border. It offered no detailed accounting in the post to reconcile its description of deportations with the report’s figures.
The department endorsed reporting by Brooke Taylor, a Fox News correspondent, who said officials were challenging the institute’s numbers. The dispute comes as the White House promotes claims of record departures and reduced border arrivals.
MPI’s analysis presents a different picture of where arrests occurred and who was deported. It also examines criminal convictions, length of U.S. residence and departures that the government does not comprehensively track.
MPI’s numbers trace where arrests happened and who was deported
The institute published its analysis on Thursday, October 22, 2026, using federal data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and Deportation Data Project records. Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, wrote the analysis as an MPI Visiting Senior Fellow.
It counted 980,000 deportations from January 20, 2025 to July 31, 2026. MPI found 69% involved migrants first intercepted at the border. Its figures also show deportations following interior arrests growing from 28% in 2025 to 39% by July 2026.
The report counted about 300,000 people arrested inside the country and 680,000 either turned around at the border or arrested there before deportation.
Interior-arrest deportations rose quickly during the period. Their monthly average climbed from 8,000 in the first three months of Trump’s term to 19,000 between May and July 2026.
MPI’s annualized projection put fiscal year 2026 deportations at about 660,000, compared with an annualized 620,000 in the administration’s first year. The projection is 26% above the FY 2021–2024 average, but far below the 1.86 million deportations recorded in FY 2000. It also falls short of the administration’s goal of 1 million a year.
The 980,000 total comprised about 580,000 removals, 300,000 enforcement returns and 110,000 administrative returns. Those categories distinguish formal removals from other types of returns.
The report counted convictions, residence and several kinds of returns
MPI found that 190,000 deportations, or 20% of the total, involved a non-citizen with a criminal conviction. Among removals, 31% involved people with convictions, below the 44% average criminality rate for FY 2009–2021.
The most common convictions were illegal entry or re-entry, accounting for 23% of criminal removals, and traffic offenses, including driving under the influence, at 21%. Rosenblum said the figures did not point to a deportation campaign focused on people convicted of serious crimes.
“These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst,” Rosenblum said.
The analysis found that 61% of ICE deportations, excluding border turnarounds, involved people who had been in the United States for at least two years. That was 390,000 people. Another 90,000, or 15%, had lived in the country for 10 or more years.
Among those with at least two years in the country, about 280,000, or 71%, had no criminal conviction. For people with at least 10 years of residence, 57,000, or 61%, had no conviction.
Rosenblum said that even among people with convictions, records more often involved immigration or traffic infractions than violent or more serious offenses. He resigned in July, saying the administration was waging a “war on immigrants.” He had joined DHS in 2016 and became executive director of its statistics office in 2023.
MPI director Doris Meissner said the analysis offered information on enforcement patterns as arrests and deportations receive more government attention. The report also counted 170,000 people who chose formal voluntary departure after giving up their immigration court cases, describing that total as an “all-time high.”
The two sides also dispute how many people have left
DHS says more than 3 million undocumented immigrants have left the country since Trump returned to office. In an October 19, 2026 release, the White House said the unauthorized population had fallen by at least 2.3 million and repeated a claim of more than three million departures. It also said the country had negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least 50 years.
MPI estimated total departures from January 20, 2025 to July 31, 2026 at between 1.3 million and 2.4 million. That calculation includes border turnarounds and deportations of people who had been in the country less than a year. The institute called a total of 3 million departures “highly unlikely,” noting that the government does not comprehensively count people who leave voluntarily.
Rosenblum separately estimated that between 310,000 and 1.5 million people who had lived in the United States for at least a year left on their own, without formal voluntary departure agreements. The range includes legal and unauthorized immigrants. To estimate departures among nationalities other than Mexicans, he used Mexican census data on citizens returning home to model a plausible level.
DHS had earlier claimed more than 2.2 million “self-deportations,” apparently using survey declines in the immigrant population. Critics argue that some immigrants may instead be avoiding government surveys.
The White House also said nearly 1.2 million people had been deported or removed and nearly 1.3 million immigrant arrests had taken place. It claimed illegal southern border crossings fell 95% from Biden-era levels in FY2026, and that nationwide encounters were below 380,000, compared with roughly 2.7 million a year under Biden.
Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, told an America First Policy Institute event near Miami on October 1, 2026, that September would likely bring the highest deportations in ICE history. “Right now we've arrested more people than in the history of this nation,” he said, adding, “Wait until you see what we do next year.”
Monthly enforcement reporting stopped in January 2025
DHS stopped publicly releasing detailed monthly enforcement figures in January 2025. The department has not since published a detailed monthly report covering ICE and Customs and Border Protection arrests and deportations.
“My office previously released monthly reports that had a lot of granular detail — on how many people were being encountered at the border, how many people were being arrested, who was being deported, what were their characteristics? And that reporting stopped in January 2025, and it hasn't resumed yet,” Rosenblum said in an NPR interview. “It may be that they find that easier when they decide what numbers to talk about.”
NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd reported that the number of people leaving detention through voluntary departure had increased tenfold. Rosenblum described prolonged detention under difficult conditions as a government strategy to persuade people to leave. Immigrant advocates and lawyers say some people give up their court cases to get out of detention.
MPI identified obstacles to the administration’s annual deportation target. Migrants now come from a wider range of countries than in earlier periods, when many unauthorized immigrants came from Mexico and rarely sought asylum. Immigration courts also face large case backlogs. People who have lived in the country longer may have more opportunities to challenge removal, while authorities typically have greater power to fast-track deportations for people arrested at the border.
