Migration Policy Institute Counts 980,000 Deportations in Trump's First 18 Months, Short of 1 Million a Year Goal

Since President Donald Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, 2025, his administration has promised mass deportations at a pace of 1 million a year. A new analysis released today, Oct. 22, puts the actual count at 980,000 through July 31, 2026.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan immigration research group, produced the numbers. The author is Marc Rosenblum, the former chief statistician at the Department of Homeland Security.

Rosenblum resigned from DHS in July. He said at the time he was protesting what he called the administration's "war on immigrants." He had been at DHS since 2016 and ran its statistics office from 2023.

What the count shows

MPI estimates about 620,000 deportations in fiscal 2025. It projects roughly 660,000 for fiscal 2026. That is 26% above the Biden administration's 2021-2024 annual average. It is far below the 1.86 million recorded in 2000 under Bill Clinton.

The administration's goal was 1 million a year. At that pace, 18 months would have produced about 1.5 million. The actual 980,000 is roughly two-thirds of that.

The 980,000 breaks down three ways:

• About 340,000 were migrants intercepted at the border and turned around by Customs and Border Protection.
• Another 340,000 were arrested at the border and later deported by ICE.
• Roughly 300,000 were first arrested inside the United States.

More than two-thirds of the total started at the border.

Interior arrests are climbing

The share of deportations involving people arrested inside the country has grown. It was 28% from Jan. 20 through Dec. 31, 2025, 34% in the first half of 2026 and 39% in July.

Interior-arrest deportations averaged about 8,000 a month in the administration's first three months. Between May and July 2026 they averaged around 19,000. Congress's multibillion-dollar enforcement funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill is fueling the buildup.

The report also lists obstacles to hitting the target. Migrants now come from a wide range of countries, which makes removals more complicated than when most were from Mexico and rarely sought asylum. Immigration courts also carry bigger case backlogs.

Who is being deported

About 20% of all deportations over the 18 months involved people with criminal convictions. Among people who had lived in the U.S. at least two years, 71% of those deported had no conviction. Among those there at least a decade, 61% had none.

Rosenblum said even among those with convictions, the records were more often immigration or traffic offenses than violent crimes. "These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst," he said.

The administration's position is different. DHS officials have maintained that living in the country illegally is sufficient reason for removal. Border czar Tom Homan told a Hispanic leadership event near Miami on Oct. 1 that "mass deportation is happening." He predicted September would be "the highest deportations of any month in the history of ICE" and said ICE has "arrested more people than in the history of this nation." He added: "Wait until you see what we do next year."

The Washington Post reports that some immigration hard-liners say Trump has not gone far enough in removing undocumented immigrants.

Two sets of numbers

DHS reports bigger totals. The department told Newsweek that as of Sept. 7, nearly 1.1 million people had been deported and more than 1.1 million arrested. It also says more than 3 million undocumented immigrants have left since January 2025, including an estimated 2.2 million who departed voluntarily.

Those figures cover a longer period than MPI's, which ends July 31. The "self-deportation" number is also disputed. It appears to rest on survey-based declines in the immigrant population, and others challenge it.

Voluntary departures that MPI counts are a separate and smaller category. The report puts them at an "all-time high" of 170,000 since January 2025. Those are people who give up their immigration-court cases and agree to leave. They could one day return to the U.S. Some immigrant advocates and lawyers say detainees accept voluntary departure just to get out of ICE detention.

The data gap

The administration stopped publicly releasing detailed deportation statistics in January 2025. MPI built its estimates from publicly available government data, including records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

That leaves outsiders reconstructing the numbers from partial records. DHS's own larger totals cannot be reconciled with MPI's from published data.

Whether Homan's forecast of record months and a bigger 2027 holds up is the next test. Fiscal 2026 ended Sept. 30, and MPI's 660,000 is a projection. It will take the administration releasing detailed figures, or further FOIA releases, to settle which count is closer.