The Department of Homeland Security reports more than 605,000 deportations since Inauguration Day. According to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies, DHS recently issued a press release announcing that more than 2.5 million illegal aliens have left the United States thanks to President Trump and Secretary Noem.
Credit belongs to Trump, Noem, Border Czar Tom Homan, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, and most importantly thousands of ICE officers executing enforcement operations on a daily basis. The agency claims DHS enforcement operations have produced more than 605,000 deportations, an impressive achievement without a doubt.
Large scale deportation efforts were standard practice for most of modern American history. The Supreme Court’s 1984 opinion in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza noted that immigration officers apprehended over one million deportable aliens every year. That figure came months before the National Academy of Sciences estimated the entire illegal population at 2 to 4 million total. Around 3 million illegal aliens took advantage of the Reagan amnesty shortly afterward, suggesting immigration officers were arresting even a sixth of all illegal aliens annually.
Andrew R. Arthur noted that when he started as an immigration judge in 2006, a quarter to half of his docket was made up of drunk drivers, domestic abusers, and street brawlers whom local cops handed over to ICE officers to save incarceration costs. Arthur observed that the arrangement remained in place well into the Obama administration, even after INS Commissioner Doris Meissner issued a prosecutorial discretion memo in November 2000 intended to limit immigration enforcement.
Everything changed when ICE Director John Morton issued his March 2011 memo directing ICE to prioritize immigration enforcement efforts. The memo concluded that ICE only had resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year. Remember that the agency operated in FY 2011 with a budget of $5.8 billion and funding for an estimated 3,000 ICE ERO officers.
The memo created an expectation of non-enforcement and a talking point critics use to complain about mass deportation under Trump’s second term. Mass deportation was the standard until recently.
Interior removals tell the real story. Nearly 224,000 of the FY 2011 deportations were interior removals. By FY 2012 interior removals fell to fewer than 181,000 and would continue declining throughout the Obama administration, dropping 64% to just 65,332 by FY 2016 largely thanks to a second memo issued by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson after the 2014 midterms.
Interior enforcement during Trump first’s presidential term never rebounded to previous heights. Interior arrests peaked in FY 2018 at just over 158,500. Things got worse under Biden, who started with an attempted 100 day moratorium on all deportations. Through the end of FY 2023, ICE struggled to exceed even 40,000 interior removals per year as the illegal population swelled by an estimated 8 million.
When Trump and Homan arrived after the 2024 election, the illegal population had increased to 15.4 million. Of those 1.44 million were aliens under final orders of removal. With Homan, Noem, Lyons, and an estimated 6,000 ICE ERO officers who’d been sidelined for four years, Trump had the team to do it.
Add the untold number of alien criminals whom ICE was aware of but not allowed to pursue under Biden, and the interior arrest numbers were sure to add up fast. DHS’s claim of 605,000 plus deportations since January 20 doesn’t sound unlikely given the massive pool of illegal targets available.
DHS also asserts that 1.9 million other illegal aliens have voluntarily self deported since January 2025. A mid-November analysis by CIS’s Steve Camarota estimated a decline in the foreign born population of about 2.3 million between January and September, suggesting the 1.9 million figure may be valid.
