The White House claims its wide-ranging deportation campaign is on track to break records this year, with the Trump administration pointing to more than 515,000 people who have been deported since the president took office.
Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the administration was “on pace to shatter historic records” because the president’s agenda “has jump-started an agency that was vilified and barred from doing its job for the last four years.”
Combined with another 1.6 million people the administration says have self-deported this year, Trump can be credited with sending over 2 million undocumented people out of the country, according to officials.
The White House may be overstating the extent of its achievements, according to critics.
“These numbers are NOT trustworthy,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X, noting that DHS stopped publishing monthly immigration enforcement data once Trump took office. “We know from previous data releases that the large 515,000 figure counts things like visa-holders turned away at airports as ‘illegal migrants deported,’ and the 1.6 million number is from an anti-immigration group using inapposite data.”
The Department of Homeland Security has relied on data sources with baked-in ambiguities to reach its 1.6 million self-deportations figure, Politifact found, including a thinktank report whose data mixed in self-deportations, deaths, government-ordered deportations, and status changes via asylum as part of its count that the number of undocumented people in the U.S. was falling under Trump, according to the outlet.
(DHS, in an X post on Tuesday, dismissed these concerns as “mental gymnastics gone wild” and vowed “the deportations will continue.”)
The department’s other marquee figure, that it’s on track to shatter deportation records, also has room for doubt.
During the 2024 fiscal year, which covered the record spike in illegal border crossings during the late Biden years, the administration deported roughly 685,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
At its current average of deporting about 57,000 people per month, the Trump administration may not equal this tally before the president’s first year in office is done.
Still, there’s no denying the Trump administration has carried out an unprecedented immigration crackdown.
The White House lobbied to get Immigration and Customs Enforcement a $75 billion surge in funding this summer, and the agency is hoping to nearly double its count of agents and reach 10,000 deportation officers by early next year. ICE is now better funded than many of the world’s militaries.
Immigration officials have also gone on a building spree, tapping private facilities and state prisons alike to hold tens of thousands of arrested immigrants per month.
This year, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded its lowest number of annual apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border since 1970, federal officials announced earlier this month.
The surge in enforcement has come at a steep human cost, though.
At least 17 people died in immigration detention during the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in September, up from 12 in the previous period, marking one of the deadliest years for immigration detainees in the last two decades.
