Agencies overseeing immigration have stopped publishing certain data, making it increasingly difficult to track effects of drastic policy changes in the second Trump administration.
The Department of Homeland Security announced last week what it called a record-breaking number of 527,000 deportations, with 364,800 coming from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and 162,200 from Customs and Border Protection.
“President Trump and Secretary Noem unleashed ICE and CBP to arrest and remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in our country,” a senior DHS official wrote in an email to NOTUS.
However, the official didn’t answer questions about how the agency defined deportations to reach the overarching number. DHS hasn’t published underlying data on removals and repatriations this year.
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This is a switch from past administrations — including Trump’s first one.
“There’s no accountability, no way to assess, no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency, and that means that we just don’t know a lot about what is going on with most of the immigration system right now,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, describing the lack of data as crushing to DHS’ credibility.
ICE also hasn’t updated its removal operations statistics dashboard since January. That dashboard details arrests, detention and removals broken down by information including criminal history — a key indicator of how an administration is prioritizing enforcement.
The government does not track how many U.S. citizens it detains, according to a ProPublica investigation that prompted an ongoing probe by Democratic members of Congressional oversight committees.
Freedom of Information Act requests have become one of the only ways the public can obtain data about Trump’s escalation of deportations. However, getting a response to a FOIA request can be a lengthy and expensive process.
During the shutdown, getting information is even more difficult. NPR reported that it filed a FOIA request in August for waivers that exempt ICE agents from using federal license plates, but received an email in October saying requests were on pause during the shutdown.
The Deportation Data Project, created by a group of academics and attorneys who publish anonymized individual data on arrests and deportations, has stopped updating during the shutdown due to lack of information from the government.
Even outside of the shutdown, obtaining data from a FOIA request can take years, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“Really, FOIA is not an adequate substitute for transparency. It is very valuable, but it cannot substitute alone for the government proactively disclosing data to the public on a regular basis so that people can track the scale of government operations and help fact check claims made by the government,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
DHS and its subagencies are not the only ones with a data problem.
The Department of State hasn’t published its monthly reports on the number of visa issuances per country and category since May and refugee admissions since December. That missing data makes it more difficult for analysts to assess the changes in the legal pathways through which people can enter the country.
There’s no data available on visa issuances since before the government started social media screenings for international students during the summer, meaning that the scope of the changes is impossible to know.
Although aggregating data isn’t instantaneous, Cecilia Esterline, a senior immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, said the lapse in time without data was beyond what is normal.
“Data transparency for us right now in immigration is like an oversight tool,” she said.
Outside of permanent and temporary immigration processes, Esterline said the economic boost expected from the World Cup next year would be hard to predict without data on the number of tourist visas the government is issuing ahead of the tournament.
The Department of State did not respond to NOTUS’ questions.
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