By Grayson Logue
Monday, July 27, 2026
It’s the second year of the president’s second term, and
a vocal part of his base is beginning to publicly break with the administration
over immigration enforcement. Allied activists have become fed up with White
House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportation policies they see
as failing to live up to campaign promises.
That’s where President Barack Obama found himself in 2014
as he faced a growing rebellion from immigrant advocacy groups that had dubbed
him the “deporter-in-chief.” Part of the reason tensions reached a boiling
point then was the way the Obama administration presented its deportation
numbers, combining removals at the border with interior deportations in order
to appear tougher on immigration enforcement to Republicans. The numbers fueled
backlash from advocacy groups and Republicans, and immigration hawks said the
administration was juicing the stats.
President Donald Trump is in a similar political
position, only inverted. His administration has pursued maximalist enforcement
for more than a year—with deadly
consequences—while also claiming the deportation campaign is prioritizing
the “worst of the worst” criminals. DHS has repeatedly said its enforcement
policies have resulted in a record-high number of deportations, but the agency
has stopped releasing the underlying data that would substantiate—or possibly
undermine—its claims. A vocal contingent of mass-deportation activists don’t
believe the topline numbers coming from DHS and argue the administration is
failing to honor Trump’s promise to deport millions of people.
“I’m confused, I’m frustrated, and quite frankly, I’m
angry because I believe we’re being intentionally misled,” Mark Morgan, a
former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) acting commissioner and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director during Trump’s first term, said
in an interview this week on the administration’s most recent
deportation claims. Morgan is a part of the Oversight Project, an activist
group lobbying for mass deportations that recently sued the administration to get access to enforcement data
DHS used to publish regularly.
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has stopped
releasing data tables from the DHS statistics office that break down how many
people have been removed from the country, under what circumstances, and by
which enforcement agency. Other agency-specific data sources have also not been
updated since Trump took office, including the ICE statistics portal, which was
previously updated quarterly.
DHS has instead put out topline totals claiming hundreds
of thousands of deportations and millions of “self-deportations,” a new
designation created when Kristi Noem was DHS secretary. In September 2025, DHS claimed it had deported 400,000 people since the beginning
of last year. That number rose to 527,000 the following month and to more than 605,000 by early December. Last August, Noem
announced that the population of illegal immigrants in the country had declined
by an estimated 1.6 million—the agency now puts the number at more than 2
million. Significantly, this number was not based on actual records DHS has of
millions of people leaving. DHS cited a Center for Immigration Studies
researcher’s analysis as the source of the initial number, but has not
explained how it has calculated the subsequent increases; the researcher,
Steven Camarota, told
The Dispatch last fall that how DHS has used the estimate doesn’t add
up.
Immigration analysts and researchers have tried to piece
together a picture of overall deportation numbers using data obtained from
Freedom of Information Act requests and the limited data on ICE detention
statistics that the administration has continued to release, though with some
interruptions. Border Patrol, CBP’s Office of Field Operations, and ICE all
conduct different kinds of removals and returns, many of which have not
previously been treated as deportations. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations
division is the primary agency responsible for apprehending noncitizens inside
the country and removing them. This kind of interior enforcement is what many
analysts treat as deportations as opposed to returns at the border or a CBP
agent turning someone away at an airport because of paperwork or visa issues.
Based on the available data, many observers have concluded
that the administration has likely been adding all these different totals on
top of ICE interior enforcement to inflate its topline deportation numbers.
The Obama administration was criticized for counting
returns at the border as deportations, something Obama himself described as “a little deceptive.” Border czar Tom Homan
appeared to reference the practice in an interview
in May in which he said DHS has deported more than 800,000 people in Trump’s
second term. “We’re trying to do the same thing we did during the Obama
administration, looking at the numbers, pull the numbers together,” he said. In
the same interview, Homan said he has pushed for more data transparency, noting
that he looks at the numbers every morning and that “[t]here’s no reason we
shouldn’t be sharing that with American people.”
Immigration hard-liners in the House sent a letter to DHS last month requesting detailed data
releases, citing conflicting reports on the numbers of deportations and the
lack of transparency in how the agency is calculating self-deportations.
Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin—Noem’s
successor—said that there were 442,637 deportations in 2025 and more
than 400,000 deportations so far in 2026. The first number matches the topline
figure for ICE returns and removals in fiscal year 2025 (October 2024 through
September 2025) that the agency cited in its budget request earlier this year. ICE also published updated
detention statistics last week—the first such release in months—that pointed to
356,000 removals thus far in fiscal year 2026. It’s unclear exactly what kinds
of removals are included in these numbers, and DHS did not respond to The
Dispatch’s request for clarification. “In President Trump’s first year back
in office, more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the
Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated
2.2 million self-deportations,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed
statement.
Ironically, the latest release of detention data has
provided the clearest sign that immigration arrests have reached their highest
levels of the term, exceeding more than 1,300 arrests a day in June and 1,400 a
day during the beginning of July. But after more than a year of DHS circulating
unsubstantiated and conflicting data, deportation hawks seem unimpressed and
disinclined to believe the numbers. Mike Howell, president of the Oversight
Project and head of the Mass Deportation Coalition, pointed out last week that the 356,000 includes exits and
removals other than from interior deportations. “The numbers are also
strikingly out of step with press releases claiming deportations cresting one
million and self-deportations exceeding 2 million,” he added.
Some MAGA influencers have echoed the disappointment.
Tomi Lahren, a Fox commentator, dedicated her podcast show
last week to criticizing DHS for fudging the numbers and producing
underwhelming results. Deportation advocates like Lahren and Howell argued that
even taking the latest 356,000 figure at face value, or as Mullin claimed,
400,000, it’s still a far cry from the expectations set by Trump during the
2024 campaign when he promised the largest deportation campaign in history that
would remove millions and millions of people from the country.
“The public deserves to know what all of this money is
being spent for,” Rosemary Jenks, the co-founder and policy director of the
Immigration Accountability Project, a deportation advocacy group affiliated
with Howell’s coalition, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last week. “We just gave
billions and billions of dollars to ICE, and we’re happy for that, we supported
that, and we want to cheerlead for ICE and for the Trump administration, but we
need the numbers in order to do that.”
“I think the numbers aren’t as good as they want them to
be,” she added. “That’s really the only conclusion we can get to.”
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