As Trump pushes deportations, immigration data becomes harder to find
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration likes to promote its immigration enforcement agenda through numbers, with ambitious goals to deport 1 million people, report zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border and arrest thousands of alleged gang members.
For all the boasting, the administration has been releasing less reliable, carefully vetted data than its predecessors on a signature policy that has become one of the most contentious of Trump’s second term.
The gap in information and a loss of figures from an office that has tracked immigration data back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration to account.
“They aren’t publishing the data,” said Mike Howell, who heads the conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group pushing for more deportations. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security has put out numbers in news releases “that purport to be statistics with no statistical backup and the numbers have jumped all over the place.”
With mass deportations a priority, new restrictions and increased enforcement have led to a surge in immigration arrests, detentions and deportations.
But finding the metrics that once measured those changes can be hard. It is an extension of earlier administration moves to limit the flow of government information by scrubbing or removing federal datasets or by the firing last year of the top official overseeing jobs data.
Important data is no longer publicly available
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics is responsible for publishing figures from Homeland Security agencies, including removals and the nationalities of those deported, to provide a comprehensive picture of immigration trends at the border and inside the United States.
Originally known as the Office of Immigration Statistics, it tracked such data since 1872. In its current form, created under the Biden administration, it also started publishing monthly reports that allowed researchers to track developments almost in real time.
But key enforcement metrics on its website have not been updated since early last year. A note on the page where the monthly reports were says it “is delayed while it is under review.”
“It’s the most timely data. It’s the most reliable data,” Austin Kocher, research professor at Syracuse University who closely follows immigration data trends, said about the monthly reports. “It has the most omniscient view of immigration enforcement across the entire agency.”
An interactive dashboard launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 once let users examine whom the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal histories and removal numbers. ICE called it a “new era in transparency.”
Though intended for quarterly updates, the latest data is from January 2025. The agency’s annual report, typically released in December, had not been published as of mid-March.
Other agencies also publish data that touches on immigration, and parts of it do continue to roll out, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics detailing border encounters or data from the Department of Justice’s immigration courts.
But experts say other data has slowed.
The State Department’s most recent visa issuance data is from August. Key statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have not been updated since October.
The now-missing data had helped researchers study the effects of different policies. Lawyers could cite the figures to support their litigation. Journalists saw in them a powerful tool to hold the government to account on public claims or to report on important trends.
“We’re all a little bit in the dark about exactly how immigration enforcement is operating at a time when it’s taking new and unprecedented forms,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
DHS did not respond to detailed questions about why it was no longer releasing specific data.
“This is the most transparent Administration in history, we release new data multiple times a week and upon reporter request,” the department said in a statement.
Researchers contend with a patchwork of numbers
Figures the administration has released are inconsistent and unverifiable.
In a Jan. 20 news release, DHS said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second release, the department put the figure at 622,000. In congressional testimony March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the figure was 700,000.
But ICE, an agency within DHS, also releases figures on how many people it has removed from the country, part of a large data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the figures put that number at roughly 400,000 over Trump’s first year.
DHS has said 2.2 million people who were in the U.S. illegally have gone home on their own, but the department has given no explanation for the count. Experts have questioned the source of that figure, saying this was not something that DHS historically has tracked.
The department did not respond to questions about where that data came from.
With key sources of data halted, researchers, advocates and others have had to rely on information the administration is obliged to report or that has come to light through legal action.
The publication of ICE detention figures — how many people are detained, for how long and whether they have committed a crime — is required by Congress and is generally released every two weeks. But the figures’ release has faced some delays and its data gets overwritten with every new publication, complicating the work of people who need access to it.
The University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, a research initiative, successfully sued through the Freedom of Information Act to access data about ICE arrests including nationalities, conviction status and whether arrests occurred at jails or in the community.
Graeme Blair, co-director of the project, said every administration has struggled with transparency in immigration enforcement, and given the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement goals, the team wanted to secure and verify information that the government might not publicly release.
“Given the scale of what they were talking about doing, it seemed really important to be able to understand, to be able to double check those numbers,” he said.
But there are limitations, he said. The data obtained through the lawsuit only runs through Oct. 15. It does not cover recent operations such as the Minneapolis enforcement surge, when federal immigration officers fatally shot two protesters, leading to widespread demonstrations and scrutiny of enforcement tactics.
The absence of data is one of the few issues that has drawn bipartisan criticism.
“We deserve to know the numbers, just like we deserve to know who’s in our country and who needs to leave,” Howell said.
Santana writes for the Associated Press.
