US carried out about 980,000 deportations in first 18 months of Trump's second term, Migration Policy Institute estimates

The estimate

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) completed about 980,000 deportations during the first 18 months of President Donald Trump's second term, from 20 January 2025 to 31 July 2026, according to an analysis published by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI). The figures include both formal removals and returns, and are based on DHS data MPI obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

On an annualised basis, MPI said the administration was on track to complete about 660,000 deportations in fiscal year 2026, up from about 620,000 in its first year. That is 26% above the average for fiscal years 2021 to 2024, but below the 1.86 million recorded in fiscal year 2000 and short of the administration's stated goal of 1 million deportations a year.

Border and interior arrests

MPI found that 69% of the deportations were of people first intercepted at the US-Mexico border, even though border encounters are at historic lows. The share resulting from arrests inside the country rose from 28% in 2025 to 39% in July 2026, and the monthly number of such deportations increased from about 8,000 in the first three months of the term to about 19,000 between May and July 2026.

About 170,000 of the deportations were grants of voluntary departure or voluntary return by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), MPI said. It found that 20% of all deportations in the period were of people who had been convicted of a crime.

Historical comparison

The 980,000 figure counts removals and returns together. Comparisons are like-for-like only when the same categories are counted.

• Removals only: MPI estimates about 380,000 removals a year in the second Trump term. It says that is between the averages of Obama's first and second terms (392,000 and 373,000 a year) and below the record of about 432,000 in FY2013. DHS yearbook figures show about 380,000 removals in each of FY2009 and FY2010.
• First 18 months: DHS publishes annual figures for that period, not monthly ones. At the FY2009-2010 rate, removals in President Obama's first 18 months come to roughly 570,000; that is our calculation. Removals and returns together come to roughly 1.4 million, because returns were much higher then (about 523,000 enforcement returns in FY2009).
• Earlier terms (DHS): removals totalled about 1.19 million in Trump's first term (FY2017-2020) and about 373,000 in FY2021-2023 under Biden. Under Biden there were also about 2.75 million Title 42 public-health expulsions, which DHS does not count as deportations and which MPI excludes from its comparison.

See the full table: Deportations under US presidents: how the numbers compare

Data

MPI estimated that between 790,000 and 1.9 million immigrants who had lived in the US for at least a year left the country through deportation or self-departure in the period, describing this as a broad estimate because DHS does not record most land exits. Bloomberg Law noted that ICE has not updated its public removals dashboard since January 2025.

How this was checked

The current-term figures are MPI's estimates, confirmed by AP and Bloomberg Law. Historical figures come from DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics yearbook Table 39, cross-checked with MPI and Pew. The 18-month figure for the Obama administration is our own calculation from annual DHS data and is labelled as such.