The Trump administration has now deported over 1,000,000 illegal immigrants from the United States, but roughly a third of those were recent border-crossers who were turned back home, according to new data obtained by The Daily Wire.
The total removals touted by the Trump administration don’t just include deportations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but also account for migrants turned away at the border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, ICE has deported roughly 706,000 of the one million total, while CBP has removed around 323,000 others, according to the data provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Additionally, the Coast Guard removed roughly 900 illegal immigrants.
Todd Bensman, who recently left his role as senior adviser to the ICE Office of the Director, said he doesn’t believe Trump administration officials are fully satisfied with the numbers.
“I don’t think anyone in the administration is thrilled with these numbers over 18 months given that 200,000-plus a month were pouring over the border for four years straight. But people have to remember that Biden left America’s deportation infrastructure in ruins as it retreated,” Bensman told The Daily Wire.
Still, Bensman, who is now serving as a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said he’s optimistic the numbers will shoot up with fewer bureaucratic hurdles in place.
“Bed space and detention centers had to be rebuilt and 10,000 agents hired and Congress wouldn’t pass the big beautiful budget bill for the first six months. Everything is finally in place now so I’m optimistic the numbers will only climb higher from here,” he said.
Other former immigration officials who support the president’s plan say he’s falling short and that the claim of one million deportations is misleading.
“People see one big number and think it’s one operation. It’s three operations rolled into one. ICE works the interior, CBP works the border, and the Coast Guard works on the water,” Scott Mechkowski, former ICE New York field office deputy director, said.
Mark Morgan, former acting CBP commissioner, said outright that “mass deportations are not happening.”
Morgan and Mechkowski are part of the Oversight Project, a nonprofit group that is advocating for a “mass deportation” and is suing the Trump administration over its failure to respond to outstanding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for deportation data. The conservative group argues that the Trump administration may have inflated its deportation statistics.
“Mass deportation is ICE,” Morgan said, adding that the removals should only account for “the people that are already in the United States being removed” and “not border security.”
Morgan likened Trump officials’ touting of one million deportations to the Obama administration’s misleading deportation data strategy.
Under then-President Barack Obama, nicknamed “the deporter-in-chief,” deportation figures largely accounted for recent border crossers who were quickly turned back.
Border returns accounted for 70% of all deportations in fiscal year 2013, according to the Migration Policy Institute. In fiscal year 2016, 85% of all deportations were immediate returns of border crossers.
“This is exactly what Obama did,” Morgan said. “Obama, leading up to the first election, he wanted to appear a little bit tough … He was combining what ICE and CBP were doing. When somebody comes to the border and they’re put through voluntary removal, expedited removal, and they’re not handed over to ICE, that’s not a deportation.”
On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said 1.4 million illegal immigrants have self-deported, either on their own or through the Trump administration’s CBP Home app, which pays for their trip home and provides a $2,600 “exit bonus.” Self-deportations are separate from the data provided by DHS.
The pace of the Trump administration’s effort is only expected to pick up with renewed pressure on ICE officers across the country to increase arrest numbers, according to agency sources.
“It’s wearing everyone out,” said one agency source.
“And at the same time, they want big arrests … but those take time to sit and find and wait. No vehicle stops too, which is harder. So they want big arrests and numbers at the same time. It’s hard to do both, not enough time or days to do it,” the source said.
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