ICE Deported a Record 483,200 People in a Year as Trump’s Crackdown Reached New Heights — and Still Fell Short of a Million

The United States deported more people in the past year than at any point in the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign reached a scale no previous administration had achieved through the agency — and still fell far short of the goal the White House set for itself.

According to the department, ICE deported 483,200 people in the fiscal year that ended on 30 September, a figure it described as the highest annual total in the agency’s 23-year history. The agency also made more than 491,000 immigration arrests during the same twelve months, including nearly 475,000 administrative arrests for civil immigration violations, another record. The figures were first obtained by CBS News and then confirmed in a formal announcement from the department.

“Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE’s history,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement that accompanied the release. “I couldn’t be prouder of the brave men and women of ICE, who just broke more historic records.”

He added: “Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives.”

The announcement landed on the same day Mr Trump issued a fresh threat to Mexico, warning on his Truth Social platform that he would immediately double tariffs on the country unless it stopped migrant caravans he said were heading towards the United States. The two developments, taken together, describe the twin engines of the administration’s immigration policy in its second year: record enforcement at home, and the threat of trade punishment abroad.

The numbers behind the record

The 483,200 deportations recorded in fiscal year 2026 were 9 per cent higher than the previous record of 442,640, set in fiscal year 2025, and 78 per cent higher than the 271,480 recorded in fiscal year 2024, the last full year of Joe Biden’s presidency, according to figures reported by the Associated Press and CBS News.

The scale of the change becomes clearer when the figures are set against the recent past. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the fiscal year 2026 deportation total was almost the same as the combined deportations of all three full fiscal years under Mr Biden, from 2022 to 2024, which stood at about 486,000. The arrest total was greater still: ICE made more arrests in a single year than in those three years combined, which totalled fewer than 427,000.

Measured against the administration’s own starting point, the acceleration is even starker. In fiscal year 2021, Mr Biden’s first year in office, ICE deported just over 59,000 people, according to the department — meaning the fiscal year 2026 total was more than eight times higher.

The department also compared the new figure with the best-known benchmark of the Obama era. According to CBS News, the 483,200 total was approximately 18 per cent higher than the 409,849 removals ICE recorded in fiscal year 2012, during Barack Obama’s presidency, a figure that stood for years as the agency’s high-water mark and earned Mr Obama the label “deporter in chief” from some activists.

The pace quickened as the year went on. ICE reported 50,925 arrests in August alone, the highest monthly total the agency has ever recorded, according to the department, and still carried out more than 48,000 arrests in September, along with 44,000 removals. September was, in Secretary Mullin’s words, “the best September in ICE’s history in terms of arrests”.

Looking beyond the fiscal year, the department said that as of October, nearly 1.2 million people had been deported and more than 1.25 million arrested since Mr Trump returned to office in January 2025.

The figures had been withheld for months. ICE had not released comparable counts since Mr Trump returned to the White House, including for fiscal year 2025, according to the Associated Press. The department’s statistics office has stopped publishing monthly data on arrests and deportations, and the ICE website dashboard that once detailed detentions, arrests and removals is no longer available.

What the headline figure does not show

The record total answers one question — how many people the agency removed — and leaves several others unanswered. The department’s announcement contained no detailed breakdown of how many of those deported had criminal histories, and no comprehensive account of who was arrested and why.

“It is accurate that ICE is making record numbers of arrests,” Marc R. Rosenblum, a visiting fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a former senior official overseeing statistics at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Associated Press. “They have record resources. They’ve doubled their staffing. They’re getting a lot of support from other law enforcement agencies.”

But, he added, the sparse data in the announcement means “we can’t really see what’s going on in any kind of detailed way”.

Independent researchers have begun to fill in some of the gaps, and their findings complicate the administration’s presentation of the campaign as a public safety operation aimed at the “worst of the worst”. A new analysis published on Wednesday by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, known as TRAC, which draws on case-level federal immigration records obtained through freedom of information litigation, found that formal removals accounted for only 63 per cent of deportations in July and August 2026, with the remainder consisting of voluntary departures and returns.

That distinction matters. A record number of reported deportations does not necessarily mean a record number of formal removal orders carried out, as CBS News noted, because ICE’s figures do not include government-wide statistics that distinguish between formal removals, voluntary returns and voluntary departures. Using broader measures, nationwide deportations reached higher thresholds during portions of the early 2000s.

On the question of who is being removed, the available evidence points away from the administration’s framing. In July, only roughly one-quarter of deportees had criminal convictions, according to the Deportation Data Project, cited by the Associated Press, and more than half were not even facing charges. A separate analysis by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute found that only about 20 per cent of approximately 980,000 deportations carried out collectively by ICE and Customs and Border Protection between January 2025 and July 2026 involved someone with a criminal conviction. Among deported immigrants who had lived in the United States for at least two years, 71 per cent had no criminal conviction.

An August analysis by CBS News found that in July 2026, for the first time during Mr Trump’s second term, more than half of ICE arrests involved immigrants who had neither criminal convictions nor pending criminal charges. The same analysis found that approximately 6 per cent of people booked into ICE detention during the second Trump administration had convictions for violent crimes.

The department has repeatedly argued that immigrants without American criminal records can still have criminal histories overseas or pose security risks, and that immigration law alone justifies civil arrest and deportation. Federal authorities have not, however, publicly provided comprehensive evidence showing how many arrested immigrants without American criminal records have committed crimes abroad.

The department did highlight individual cases in its announcement, including that of Raul Genesis Ortiz Moran, a Mexican national charged with second-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault in connection with the death of a two-year-old girl in Virginia, charges independently confirmed by the Louisa County Sheriff’s Office, and Soili Xiomara Aparicio-Santos, a Honduran national deported in April who, according to the department, was convicted of attempting to murder her newborn son in New York. As CBS News observed, such cases illustrate the serious public safety threats immigration officers can encounter, but they are not representative of hundreds of thousands of arrests.

Minneapolis and the political backlash

The record figures arrive at a politically complicated moment for the president. Mr Trump returned to power promising mass deportations, and the policy helped win back the White House. But the way the campaign has been carried out in American cities has become one of the most divisive issues of his second term, and, according to the Associated Press, it fuelled the political blowback that led to the Democrats’ sweeping victory in last week’s midterm elections.

The sharpest turn came earlier this year in Minneapolis, where more than 2,000 federal officers were deployed to the city and thousands of protesters turned out to confront masked and often heavily armed agents arriving in convoys of unmarked vehicles. Two American citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 — were killed in confrontations with agents, and the administration quickly backed away from high-profile operations. Arrests dropped after the killings, according to the Associated Press, but quickly returned to record numbers in quieter immigration sweeps.

By the time voters went to the polls last week, the White House’s immigration message had splintered. Even some deeply Republican rural areas voted Democratic, the Associated Press reported, after residents saw longtime migrant neighbours — many of them key workers on farms, ranches and meat-processing facilities — taken in arrests.

The scale of public disquiet was captured in CBS News’s national exit polling from the midterm elections, in which 58 per cent of voters said the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement had gone too far. Another 22 per cent said it had been about right, while 20 per cent believed it had not gone far enough.

Mr Trump has publicly acknowledged the political damage. “I think it was too tough,” he told the CBS News programme 60 Minutes, in an interview with correspondent Ross Douthat. He added that his administration received high marks for securing the border and removing dangerous criminals, but faced criticism for deporting longtime immigrants who held jobs, worked in industries such as landscaping and hospitality, and in some cases paid taxes. In the same interview, he expressed interest in working with congressional Democrats in the new Congress to create and pass immigration legislation — a striking acknowledgement from a president who built much of his political identity around the promise of mass deportations.

Democrats are preparing to take control of both chambers of Congress in January, and some have voiced support for more scrutiny of the administration’s immigration operations, spending and enforcement tactics. According to Al Jazeera, Democrats say they will investigate the tactics used, and the White House has warned Democrats over future probes. Their ability to force changes could nevertheless be constrained by the billions already appropriated to ICE, in addition to presidential veto power.

Trump turns to tariffs as a caravan moves north

Hours before the deportation figures were published, Mr Trump opened a second front in the immigration debate, this time aimed at Mexico. In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, he said huge caravans were forming and beginning their “illegal march” through Mexico, and warned that if Mexico did not stop them, tariffs on the country “will be IMMEDIATELY DOUBLED”.

“Mexico must stop them now,” he wrote, adding that there would be “no leniency”.

A caravan estimated at about 1,500 migrants, including families, left Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, on Tuesday, according to Reuters, citing a source in the Chiapas state government. Other reports put the number closer to 2,000. Mr Trump did not specify which tariffs he would double or identify the legal authority he would use to raise them.

The threat comes at a moment when illegal crossings at the southern border have fallen to historic lows. The Department of Homeland Security reported nearly 98,700 apprehensions of people illegally crossing the border during the fiscal year that ended on 30 September, the lowest annual total since 1968, according to figures cited by the Financial Times.

The warning could also complicate trade negotiations between Washington and Mexico City aimed at lowering existing American tariffs, including duties on steel, aluminium and automobiles. White House border czar Tom Homan said the administration would not allow the caravans to cross the border illegally, regardless of the midterm election results.

The money and the machine

Behind the record figures sits an enforcement apparatus that has been expanded on a scale without precedent. A sweeping tax and spending law signed by Mr Trump in July 2025 allocated roughly $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, including $75 billion in additional funding for ICE. Of that, $45 billion was designated to expand immigrant detention capacity, while nearly $30 billion was allocated for arrests, transportation, deportation operations and additional personnel.

The administration has also moved to protect the campaign from political headwinds. Stephen Miller, the longtime aide who has historically pushed for higher arrest targets and who is the architect of many of Mr Trump’s most restrictive immigration policies, has been elevated to White House chief of staff. Multiple administration officials told CBS News that they did not expect the crackdown to slow down following the election.

In recent weeks, ICE officials have been instructed to aim for approximately 19,000 arrests per week, according to sources familiar with the agency’s planning cited by CBS News — a target established before the midterms and substantially above the agency’s historical pace.

How the record compares with history

ICE was created in 2003, in the reorganisation of federal agencies that followed the attacks of 11 September 2001, and its deportation totals have risen and fallen with the politics of each presidency. The 483,200 figure is the highest in the agency’s own reported history, surpassing both the Obama-era peak and the previous year’s record.

It is not, however, the highest number of deportations ever recorded in American history. That distinction belongs to the Eisenhower era: the highest recorded number of deportations came during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s crackdown on illegal immigrants from Mexico, when totals spiked dramatically in the early 1950s, cresting at 1.1 million in 1954, according to the Associated Press. The counting methods of that era were very different, and the figure includes large numbers of voluntary returns recorded during a chaotic and often brutal campaign, so the comparison is instructive rather than exact.

The other yardstick is the one the White House set for itself. The numbers released on Thursday fell well short of the administration’s goal of one million deportations a year, a promise made when it received billions in additional funding from Congress. At 483,200, the fiscal year 2026 total reached less than half of that target.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The deportation figures released on Thursday are, at first glance, a straightforward story of a promise kept. A president who campaigned on mass deportations has delivered the largest removal year in the history of the agency charged with carrying them out. But the numbers repay closer reading, because they describe a campaign that is simultaneously more powerful than any before it and more politically vulnerable than its architects expected.

1. A record that is also a shortfall

The most important fact about the 483,200 figure is not that it is a record but that it is less than half of what the White House promised. One million deportations a year was the stated goal, backed by roughly $170 billion in new funding, and the administration reached 48 per cent of it. That gap matters because it reframes the debate: the question is no longer whether the government can deport at an unprecedented rate — it plainly can — but whether even an unprecedented rate is enough to satisfy a political movement that treats mass deportation as its defining test. The administration has answered that question by pressing on regardless, raising weekly arrest targets to about 19,000 and promoting the policy’s chief architect to the most powerful staff job in the White House. The record, in other words, is not a ceiling. It is a floor from which the campaign intends to climb.

2. The counting question: what a “deportation” means now

The second lesson of the figures is that the word “deportation” no longer means quite what it used to. Independent researchers at Syracuse University found that only 63 per cent of the people counted as deported in July and August were formally removed under a removal order; the rest left through voluntary departure or return. That does not make the total false, but it does make it different from the totals it is being compared with, and it explains why the department’s own announcement was so thin on detail. A government that stops publishing monthly data and takes down its public dashboard while announcing record totals invites exactly the scepticism that followed this release. The credibility of the record depends on transparency the administration has chosen not to provide, and every future announcement will now be read through that filter.

3. The politics of “too far”

The third lesson is political, and it is the one the president himself has now conceded. A policy can be popular in the abstract and unpopular in practice. Border security commands broad support; masked officers pulling longtime neighbours out of farm towns does not. The exit polling — 58 per cent saying the enforcement had gone too far — is the clearest measure of that gap, and the midterm results gave it electoral form. Mr Trump’s admission on 60 Minutes that the crackdown was “too tough”, and his openness to immigration legislation with Democrats, suggests a White House that understands the political cost. But the simultaneous elevation of Stephen Miller and the 19,000-a-week arrest target suggest a White House that has no intention of paying it by slowing down. The tension between those two impulses — acknowledge the backlash, escalate the policy — will define the final two years of the presidency.

4. Tariffs as immigration policy

The fourth lesson lies in the Mexico threat issued on the same day as the figures. With border apprehensions at their lowest since 1968, the administration’s justification for threatening to double tariffs is not a crisis at the border but a caravan of about 1,500 people still hundreds of miles away. The episode shows how fully trade policy has been absorbed into immigration policy: tariffs are now a lever to be pulled against a neighbouring government whenever the White House wants movement on migration, regardless of the state of the border or the state of trade negotiations. The danger for the administration is that the lever is imprecise. Doubling tariffs on Mexico would raise prices for American businesses and consumers, complicate the trade talks Washington is conducting with Mexico City, and test whether voters who endorsed a crackdown on immigration will also endorse paying for it at the checkout.

5. A machine built to keep running

The final lesson is structural. The $170 billion appropriated in July 2025, the detention capacity being built with $45 billion of it, the doubled staffing and the weekly arrest targets together form a machine that does not depend on any single election result to keep running. Democrats will take both chambers of Congress in January and have promised investigations and scrutiny, but the money is already appropriated, the personnel already hired, and the president retains his veto. That is why the figures matter beyond the news cycle: they mark the moment when an enforcement campaign stopped being a surge and became an institution. The debate in Washington will now be about whether that institution can be steered, slowed or redirected — or whether, once built at this scale, it simply continues.

What to Watch Next

1. The weekly arrest pace. Whether ICE sustains its target of about 19,000 arrests a week in the coming months, and whether the quieter sweeps that replaced the high-profile Minneapolis-style operations keep producing record monthly totals.
2. The caravan and the tariff threat. Whether the group of about 1,500 migrants that left Tapachula reaches the Mexican border, and whether Mr Trump follows through on his warning to double tariffs on Mexico — and, if so, which tariffs and under what legal authority.
3. Democratic oversight in January. What form the promised investigations take when Democrats assume control of both chambers of Congress, and whether hearings on enforcement tactics, spending and the deaths in Minnesota produce new disclosures or legislation.
4. Immigration legislation talks. Whether Mr Trump’s stated interest in working with congressional Democrats on immigration law develops into a concrete proposal, and what such a bill would offer in exchange for continued enforcement funding.
5. The data gap. Whether the Department of Homeland Security resumes publishing monthly arrest and deportation data and a criminal-history breakdown, and what further analysis from TRAC and the Migration Policy Institute reveals about who is being arrested and removed.
6. The courts. Whether legal challenges to enforcement tactics, detention conditions or the use of tariffs as an immigration lever reach the courts, and how judges respond.
7. The first numbers of fiscal year 2027. Whether the October–December quarter keeps the agency on course to match or exceed the fiscal year 2026 record, or whether political pressure and oversight begin to bend the curve.

Sources

• US Department of Homeland Security — “ICE Breaks Records in Fiscal Year 2026, With Most Arrests and Deportations in Agency’s History”
• Associated Press, via The Hindu BusinessLine — “US deports record 4,83,200 people under Trump as immigration crackdown faces backlash”
• CBS News (Nicole Sganga), via WGHN — “ICE deportations and arrests hit record high”
• Reuters — “Trump threatens to double tariffs on Mexico if it does not halt migrants”
• Newsmax — “ICE Deportations Hit Record 483,200 in 2026”
• The Hindu BusinessLine — “Trump threatens Mexico with doubled tariffs as nearly 2,000 migrants head towards US border”