Deportations Hit 660,000 in a Year but Fall Short of Trump's Million Goal

The Trump administration deported about 660,000 people in the last fiscal year, according to a report released on Thursday, October 22 by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. The pace is faster than a year earlier, and arrests are rising across the country. It is still far short of what the White House promised.

Short of the goal

Administration officials told Congress that the billions of dollars lawmakers approved for immigration enforcement would allow one million deportations a year. The institute's count reaches about two thirds of that pace. Its analysis found 620,000 deportations in the first year of President Donald Trump's second administration, and 980,000 in the first 18 months.

The 660,000 figure is a 26 percent increase from the yearly average between 2021 and 2024, under President Joe Biden. It is well below the 1.86 million deportations recorded in 2000, under President Bill Clinton, the high mark in the institute's comparison. The report also counted about 170,000 voluntary departures since Trump returned to office, an all time high, as people chose to leave on their own rather than wait to be removed.

More arrests far from the border

Bloomberg Law reported that immigration officials are now deporting more people who were first arrested in the interior of the country, including people who have lived in the United States for years. The largest share of those deported were still arrested at the border, the institute said. Bloomberg called the report one of the first full views of how the administration's deportation strategy is working in practice.

Trump returned to power last year promising to stop crossings at the southern border and to crack down on immigration. His administration has tightened rules on both legal and illegal immigration and has run high profile arrest operations meant to push migrants to leave.

A count built from fragments

The institute built its numbers from public data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. The Associated Press reported that the administration stopped publicly releasing similar figures compiled by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2025. Congress required Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2019 to publish data that includes how many people it deports, but the agency has not updated its deportation dashboard since January 2025, even though the pages say they will be updated every quarter.

"We're releasing many fewer numbers than the department has historically released," Marc Rosenblum, a visiting senior fellow at the institute, told reporters this week. Rosenblum led the Department of Homeland Security's own statistics office until July of this year. "Even with this fact sheet, we still know much less about the results of the department's actions than we have historically known."

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the missing data or the updated figures, Bloomberg Law reported. The report arrives less than two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, with immigration again at the center of the campaign.