The Trump deportations total has climbed to about 980,000 in the first 18 months of President Donald Trump's second term, according to a new Migration Policy Institute analysis, and four out of five of the people deported had no criminal conviction. The Trump deportations study, released on October 22, 2026, covers January 20, 2025 through July 31, 2026 and offers the most detailed independent count yet of an enforcement campaign that has become one of the defining issues of the November 3 midterm elections.

Written by Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Homeland Security Statistics and now a Migration Policy Institute visiting senior fellow, the analysis draws on federal data obtained from Homeland Security under the Freedom of Information Act, including records gathered by the University of California's Deportation Data Project. It counts deportations by both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including formal removals, enforcement returns and voluntary departures.

Key Points

• About 980,000 deportations were completed in the first 18 months of Trump's second term, from January 20, 2025 to July 31, 2026, the Migration Policy Institute found.
• Only about 20 percent of those deported — roughly 190,000 people — had a criminal conviction; 80 percent had no criminal record.
• About 69 percent of deportations involved people first intercepted at the border, but the share from arrests inside the United States rose from 28 percent in 2025 to 39 percent by July 2026.
• The administration was on pace for about 660,000 deportations in fiscal year 2026, up 26 percent on the Biden-era annual average but short of its goal of one million a year.
• The Department of Homeland Security rejected the analysis on October 25, calling it "FAKE NEWS" and saying more than three million undocumented immigrants have left since Trump returned to office.

What Happened

The Migration Policy Institute published its fact sheet, "U.S. Deportations and Self-Deportations in the First 18 Months of the Second Trump Term," on Thursday, October 22, 2026. It is one of the first attempts to build a comprehensive picture of deportations since Homeland Security stopped publishing a detailed monthly report covering ICE and CBP arrests and deportations in January 2025. Because the department has largely stopped releasing that data, the administration's own deportation claims have been difficult to verify independently — a gap the institute set out to fill with records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The headline figure, about 980,000 deportations, breaks down into roughly 580,000 formal removals, about 300,000 enforcement returns and about 110,000 administrative returns, according to reporting on the study. About 680,000 of the people deported were either turned around at the border or arrested there and deported after processing, while about 300,000 had been arrested inside the United States. The institute also counted about 170,000 grants of voluntary departure or voluntary return — an all-time high, it said — as the administration has sought to bypass backlogged immigration courts, which hear removal cases.

Using publicly available survey data and a new methodology, the institute also estimated total departures — deportations plus "self-deportations" by people who left on their own — at between 1.3 million and 2.4 million over the same period. It described the administration's claim of three million departures as "highly unlikely," noting that the government does not comprehensively count people who leave voluntarily.

Background and Context

Trump returned to office promising the largest deportation programme in American history and repeatedly pledging to target what he has described as "the worst of the worst" criminals living in the United States. The new figures show a pace higher than under the Biden administration and higher than during Trump's first term, but still well below the levels routinely seen in the early 2000s. The institute noted that deportations reached 1.86 million in fiscal year 2000, during President Bill Clinton's administration, when border encounters were far higher.

The composition of the 980,000 is where the study most sharply departs from the administration's framing. Among people who had lived in the United States for at least two years, 71 percent of those deported had never been convicted of a crime. Among those who had lived in the country for a decade or longer, 61 percent had no criminal record. Even among formal removals, where criminal offenders have traditionally represented a larger share, only 31 percent had criminal convictions — significantly lower than the 44 percent average recorded between fiscal years 2009 and 2021. Rosenblum has noted that even among those with convictions, records more often involved immigration or traffic infractions than violent or more serious offences.

The enforcement pattern has also shifted over time. Deportations resulting from interior arrests more than doubled in pace, from an average of 8,000 per month in the first three months of the second Trump term to 19,000 per month on average between May and July 2026. Border encounters, meanwhile, have fallen to historic lows, yet the border still accounts for most deportations. "Despite everything happening inside the country, most deportations are still the result of encounters at the border," Rosenblum said.

Trump Deportations 980,000: Who Was Deported and How the Count Works

Understanding the 980,000 figure requires understanding what the institute counts. Its total includes people formally removed after an immigration court order, people returned at the border after being intercepted, and people granted voluntary departure — a process in which a person agrees to leave rather than fight a removal case, sometimes to avoid remaining in detention. Advocates cited in the National Immigration Forum's October 30 policy bulletin said some people abandoned their immigration cases for exactly that reason.

Two cases highlighted in that bulletin illustrate the broader reach of the enforcement effort. Luis Arreguin, a father of four who had lived near Fresno, California, since he was five years old, was detained on his way to work and deported to Mexico within 16 days. ICE said Arreguin had a criminal history and had previously been deported, although he reported no recent interactions with law enforcement, and a public records search found no recent criminal history. Moussa Diawara, a Texas father with no criminal record, was deported to Ghana and days later sent on to Mali after local officials forced him onto a flight, despite a U.S. immigration judge's previous ruling that he would likely face persecution there. Of the 63 people aboard Diawara's deportation flight to Ghana, 62 percent had no criminal record, 19 percent had traffic violations, and 19 percent had been charged with or convicted of other offences.

The study's release landed in a week when the immigration enforcement apparatus itself was expanding into everyday policing. More than 1,850 state and local law enforcement agencies had joined ICE's 287(g) Task Force Model as of October 1, according to an October 28 analysis by FWD.us, with more than 29,000 officers in 30 states now deputized — more than twice ICE's own deportation officer workforce. Arrests involving 287(g) officers rose from just over 1,000 in August 2025 to more than 6,600 in July 2026, following the introduction of federal financial incentives, and participating agencies are eligible for an estimated $2 billion in payments through fiscal year 2026.

Reactions and Quotes

The Department of Homeland Security pushed back hard. On October 25, the department rejected the Migration Policy Institute analysis, calling it "FAKE NEWS," and endorsed reporting by Fox News correspondent Brooke Taylor, who said officials were challenging the institute's numbers. The department has credited Trump with a steep drop in illegal immigration and maintains that more than three million undocumented immigrants have left the country since he returned to office — a figure the institute says is not supported by the data it could obtain.

Migration Policy Institute director Doris Meissner said the analysis offered information on enforcement patterns at a time when arrests and deportations are receiving more government attention. The institute's position is that its count, built from the government's own records obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests, is the most complete public accounting available while Homeland Security withholds its detailed monthly enforcement reports.

The courts have also been shaping the enforcement landscape in parallel. On October 23, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 10-7 that the administration's policy of detaining people who entered the country unlawfully without access to bond hearings does not violate due process, even when they have lived in the United States for years. Writing for the majority, Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee, said that because the men challenging the policy had never been lawfully admitted, the Constitution did not entitle them to additional proceedings beyond those Congress provided before detention pending removal. The ruling applies in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and it closed an avenue for challenging detention that had remained available after the Fifth Circuit upheld the policy's statutory basis in February — although federal district judges in Texas had ordered bond hearings or release for more than 2,000 detainees on constitutional grounds. Nine of the 11 federal appeals courts to address the policy have rejected the administration's interpretation of immigration law, and earlier in October the Supreme Court agreed to review whether the policy complies with the Immigration and Nationality Act.

On October 27, the Supreme Court separately declined to restore a Biden-era regulation allowing immigration judges to temporarily suspend certain deportation proceedings through "administrative closure," leaving in place a judgment obtained through an agreement between Texas and the Justice Department. The brief, unsigned order offered no explanation and noted no dissents. The cities of Baltimore, New Haven and Columbus, along with the legal services organization Centro Legal de la Raza, had asked the justices to restore the rule while they appealed a lower court's refusal to let them intervene to defend it.

Why It Matters

The 980,000 figure matters for three reasons. First, it reframes the central promise of the second Trump term's immigration policy. An enforcement campaign sold as a hunt for violent criminals has, on the government's own records as assembled by the institute, mostly removed people with no criminal conviction at all — and the longer someone had lived in the United States, the more likely they were to have no criminal record. That gap between rhetoric and record is now documented in numbers rather than anecdotes, and it is likely to feature in the final days of the midterm campaign, when immigration is among the most contested issues on the ballot.

Second, the study exposes how much of the enforcement story is now invisible by design. With detailed monthly ICE and CBP reporting suspended since January 2025, independent researchers, journalists and Congress are forced to reconstruct the programme from Freedom of Information Act releases and outside datasets. The dispute over whether three million people or roughly one to two million people have left is not a rounding error — it is a measure of how far public accountability has eroded, and it leaves voters to choose between competing claims days before they vote.

Third, the interior-arrest surge and the 287(g) expansion mean immigration enforcement is no longer principally a border story. When local police, sheriff's deputies and even wildlife officers can trigger immigration detention during routine encounters, and when arrests involving deputized officers have multiplied more than sixfold in a year, the programme touches communities far from the border — including places like Ingram, Texas, where police recorded 194 immigration-related incidents by August, a number equivalent to roughly 10 percent of the town's population. Advocates warn that linking routine policing to immigration enforcement discourages residents from reporting crimes or seeking help, undermining the cooperation local agencies need to protect public safety.

What Happens Next

The immediate test is political. Voters go to the polls on Tuesday, November 3, with control of Congress at stake, and immigration — along with the cost of living and the war in Iran — is among the issues most likely to decide tight Senate and House races. The administration's deportation record will be defended by Republicans as delivery on a core promise and attacked by Democrats as overreach that has swept up long-term residents without criminal records.

The legal test continues in parallel. The Supreme Court's review of the mandatory detention policy's compliance with the Immigration and Nationality Act will determine whether people who entered unlawfully can be held without bond hearings indefinitely, while challenges to the detention policy's constitutional basis continue in other circuits. The Fifth Circuit's ruling governs only Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi for now, but its reasoning will be cited nationwide.

The data test is the one that may matter most in the long run. The institute's fact sheet covers only through July 31, 2026. Deportations from interior arrests were still accelerating at that point, and the 287(g) programme was still expanding, so the next independent count — whenever the data to build it becomes available — could show a materially different mix. Whether Homeland Security resumes detailed monthly reporting, or continues to rely on headline claims that researchers cannot verify, will decide whether the public ever gets a definitive answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people has the Trump administration deported in its second term?

About 980,000 people were deported in the first 18 months, from January 20, 2025 to July 31, 2026, according to the Migration Policy Institute's analysis of Homeland Security data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

How many of those deported had a criminal record?

Only about 20 percent — roughly 190,000 people — had a criminal conviction. The other 80 percent had no criminal record, and among people who had lived in the United States for at least two years, 71 percent of those deported had never been convicted of a crime.

Is the administration meeting its goal of one million deportations a year?

Not yet. The administration was on pace for about 660,000 deportations in fiscal year 2026, up 26 percent on the Biden-era annual average but short of one million a year. The administration has said additional funding from Congress would allow it to reach that goal.

Why does the Department of Homeland Security dispute the 980,000 figure?

Homeland Security called the analysis "FAKE NEWS" on October 25 and says more than three million undocumented immigrants have left since Trump returned to office. The institute says that figure counts self-departures the government does not comprehensively track, and it estimates total departures at between 1.3 million and 2.4 million.

What is the 287(g) programme, and why does it matter?

The 287(g) Task Force Model deputizes state and local officers to carry out immigration enforcement during routine policing, including traffic stops. More than 1,850 agencies had joined by October 1, 2026, and arrests involving deputized officers rose from just over 1,000 in August 2025 to more than 6,600 in July 2026.

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