While the Trump administration boasts about its high deportation numbers, it hasn’t been publishing comprehensive data, leaving researchers, reporters and the public little to go on but the administration’s words.
The Department of Homeland Security said it has deported 142,000 people as of April 30, a figure that includes removals from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Coast Guard, according to a White House official.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that the fact that President Joe Biden’s ICE removal figures were higher — ICE reportedly deported around 11,000 people in Trump’s first month, falling short of the number of ICE deportations during that same time period in 2024 — was a sign that their predecessors were being deceptive.
“They’re letting the Biden administration get away with manipulating and cooking the books,” she said at a cabinet meeting.
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But some immigration experts are questioning the validity of the Trump administration’s figures — although it’s impossible to know for sure based on the limited information it has published.
About 65,000 deportations can be accounted for by tracking public information about ICE Air Operations flights and ICE detention management data. As for the rest, a White House official told NOTUS that total deportations by ICE as well as CBP and the Coast Guard come out to around 140,000. (DHS put the figure at 142,000.)
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, said the numbers don’t track.
“It raises a lot of very serious questions, because that number seems dramatically higher than possible,” he said, referring to CBP stating it carried out over 66,000 deportations. “Where do you get 66,000 from CBP? That number, it doesn’t fit, and that suggests to me that DHS is using a different definition of ‘remove’ than someone issued a formal removal order.”
Neither the White House nor DHS acknowledged questions from NOTUS about how they’re defining “removal” and “deportation” when they tabulate deportation totals.
The CBP number raises eyebrows in large part because encounters at the southern border have fallen dramatically.
In the first three months of the year, there have only been about 45,000 encounters by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the southern border. CBP’s Office of Field Operations monitors customs and encounters millions of people a year. In most cases, those individuals are “turned back,” not issued a removal order.
In addition to ICE and CBP figures, about 11,000 deportations would be left to the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of DHS. It would be unusual for the Coast Guard to formally order someone deported, experts said.
The figure would mean the Coast Guard was encountering drastically more people than normal, Reichlin-Melnick said.
“I feel like we would have heard about that,” he said.
Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Center, said she was struck by the inclusion of U.S. Coast Guard interdictions, which, to her knowledge, aren’t typically included.
The Coast Guard did not respond to a request for comment, nor did CBP. DHS did not respond to questions about plans to publish data.
Experts offered a range of theories for how the administration is getting to the number it’s sharing. But the bottom line is that it’s impossible to know for sure what exactly the numbers mean because they’re not publicly sharing comprehensive data.
During the Biden administration, DHS began publishing the Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables. The last time that data was published was Jan. 16 — it should have been published three times since then. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics, a dashboard displaying information and statistics, also hasn’t been updated since January 2025.
“It’s not to say that these numbers are incorrect, because we just don’t know,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “But not having a breakdown of the numbers makes it really challenging to understand where these numbers are coming from and how they’re being calculated.”
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Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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