The Trump administration carried out roughly 980,000 deportations in the first 18 months of the president’s second term, and in most of those cases, the people removed had no criminal conviction.
This finding cuts against the public-safety rationale the administration has used to justify the campaign.
The figure comes from an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington research group, written by Marc Rosenblum, who once ran the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Its release was first reported this week by Reuters.
Rosenblum found that just 20 percent of all deportations in the period involved someone with a criminal conviction. The gap was wider among immigrants who had built lives in the country: of those deported after two or more years of U.S. residence, 71 percent had no conviction of any kind. President Trump has repeatedly framed his deportation drive as a security measure, saying it is meant to improve domestic safety. The report describes an effort that has fallen most heavily on people the administration’s own stated priorities would not reach first.
What the government counts as a deportation
Part of why deportation figures are so contested is that the word covers several different government actions, and the report separates them. Of the 980,000 cases, about 580,000 — 59 percent — were removals, the formal deportations that can bar a person from legally returning for years. Another 30 percent, roughly 300,000, were enforcement returns, and the remaining 11 percent, about 110,000, were administrative returns, generally faster processes with lighter long-term consequences. Most of the total fell into the most serious category, according to Reuters.
The breadth of the count also explains why this tally runs higher than some others. Throughout the term, the number of deportations has shifted depending on which agencies and categories are included. Independent trackers working from public-records requests have reported far smaller figures for narrower slices of the data — earlier in the term, UCLA’s Deportation Data Project counted about 350,000 ICE deportations and the research group TRAC estimated roughly 234,000 over the first nine months of 2025, both excluding many border cases. The Migration Policy Institute’s larger number reflects a broader accounting that folds in Customs and Border Protection returns alongside ICE removals.
On an annual basis, the report found deportations running higher than under former President Joe Biden and during Trump’s own first term, but still well below the levels routinely recorded in the early 2000s.
Researchers have been tracking the shape of the second-term crackdown since its early months. In a January assessment, the Migration Policy Institute wrote that the administration had “dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants.” Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a researcher at the institute, said at the time that “in the last year, we’ve seen some parts of that deportation effort increase, while others have stayed the same.” Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, told PolitiFact the enforcement had been “more sensational, intrusive, and focused on ‘low-hanging fruit'” than under past presidents.
The White House has rejected the suggestion that the numbers fall short or miss their targets. A spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said in January that Trump was “keeping his promise and the American people are appreciative.” Vice President JD Vance has argued that comparisons with past administrations are misleading because, in his words, “in the Obama administration, they counted being turned away at the border as a deportation” — a practice analysts say inflated earlier totals and likely lifts the current count as well.
Immigrant-rights advocates have pressed a different objection. They say the campaign has violated due-process and free-speech protections and made daily life more dangerous for ethnic minorities, some of whom report being subjected to racial profiling, according to Reuters.
The deportation report landed in the same week as an escalation in visa enforcement.
The State Department said Tuesday it had revoked more than 300,000 U.S. visas since the start of Trump’s second term — up sharply from the roughly 175,000 it reported in an update on August 10, a jump of well over 100,000 in about ten weeks.
Among the revocations that have drawn the sharpest criticism are those aimed at people who joined pro-Palestinian protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, and at foreign nationals who posted social-media comments about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Reuters reported.
The administration’s removal efforts have met a wall of litigation with mixed results, leaving some measures in force and others blocked as the cases move through the courts.
https://ctninfo.com/report-finds-980…-first-18-months/
Source: Reuters
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