dpCracking down on immigration has been the centerpiece of the Trump administration, but the government has limited the public’s access to the numbers. A new study gives us a clearer picture.
Transcript
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A new analysis published this week is giving us a clearer picture of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. How many people have been deported so far, and how many have self-deported? NPR’s Jasmine Garsd covers immigration and is here in the studio. Hey there.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: Hi.
SUMMERS: So, Jasmine, tell us a little bit more about this new paper, and what did it find?
GARSD: Sure. So this was published by the Migration Policy Institute, which is a nonpartisan think tank. And it found that close to a million people have been deported since President Trump took office, which is a huge number, but it’s not higher than in the past. I mean, in the year 2000, under President Clinton, there were around 1.86 million deportations.
SUMMERS: Interesting. OK, let’s break this down. What can you tell us about the immigrants who have been deported in the last 18 months?
GARSD: So border crossings are now at a historic low, but most of the people deported during this Trump administration were apprehended at the border. However, there have been more ICE operations in the interior of the country recently. We’ve gone from an average of around 8,000 deportations a month early in this administration to a recent average of around 19,000 deportations in the interior of the country.
SUMMERS: And as we know and as you’ve been reporting, I mean, immigration enforcement is a cornerstone of the Trump presidency. And yet the Trump administration has made numbers about this crackdown harder to access. Why is that?
GARSD: Well, the government has simply stopped publishing some numbers. You know, the author of this analysis we’re talking about today is Marc Rosenblum. He’s with the Migration Policy Institute, but up until recently, he was the head of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Here he is.
MARC ROSENBLUM: My office previously released monthly reports that had a lot of granular detail – on how many people were being encountered at the border, how many people were being arrested, who was being deported, what were their characteristics? And that reporting stopped in January 2025, and it hasn’t resumed yet. It may be that they find that easier when they decide what numbers to talk about.
GARSD: And he pointed out that the president has promised he’d deport a million people a year. That hasn’t happened. You hear over and over again that we’re tackling the worst of the worst, but the numbers show that only around 20% of people deported have a criminal conviction.
SUMMERS: Right, and Jasmine, I mean, you cover immigration for us. You follow all of this so closely – things like rising enforcement in the interior of the country, people without criminal convictions being deported. When you went through this analysis, was there anything that surprised you or stuck out?
GARSD: Yeah, the self-deportation numbers – they really tell the story of how the Trump administration is cracking down on immigration. So, you know, the government says more than 3 million people have self-deported. This analysis says it’s more like between 310,000 and 1.5 million immigrants who have left. Now, that’s both unauthorized and legal immigrants.
SUMMERS: OK.
GARSD: But there’s also been a rise in voluntary departures. Now, that’s not the same as a deportation. That’s an option that allows an immigrant facing removal to leave rather than be formally deported. That number of people just tapping out of detention has increased tenfold.
SUMMERS: Wow.
GARSD: Well, Rosenblum says, this is an explicit government strategy, using prolonged detention under difficult conditions to convince people to leave. I should point out that just a few hours ago, Juana, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that ICE detainees with pending cases have no constitutional right to a bond hearing. So we may just see that number – that number of people tapping out – go up.
SUMMERS: NPR’s Jasmine Garsd covers immigration. Thanks so much.
GARSD: Thanks for having me.
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