Approximately 980,000 people were deported during the first 18 months of Donald Trump's second term, and 80% of them had no criminal record, according to an analysis published this Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan research group.
The finding directly contradicts the central promise of Trump's campaign: that mass deportations would target "the worst of the worst," namely, murderers, rapists, and gang members.
The study was prepared by Marc Rosenblum, who prior to joining the MPI led the Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency responsible for gathering those figures.
Of the 20% who had some criminal history, about half of the reported charges correspond to traffic violations or irregular border crossing, not violent or serious crimes.
"It is not the case that the majority of convictions are for violent or serious crimes," Rosenblum noted, adding, "I believe that by focusing so broadly on deporting as many people as possible, it makes it difficult to focus on deporting as many criminals as possible."
The analysis covers the period from January 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026, and was made possible by data obtained through public information requests (FOIA), as the DHS stopped publishing detailed statistics on deportations since the beginning of the administration.
The figure of 980,000 expulsions also falls short of the goal of one million annual deportations that the White House promised, and is lower than the 1.1 million that the government itself has publicly boasted.
A further detail that highlights the contrast: even when only counting the deportations of individuals with criminal records, the figures from Trump's second term are lower than those recorded during the Bush and Obama administrations.
"Even with all the resources that the current Administration has dedicated to arresting and deporting people, if we look at the annual comparative numbers, they are below the high levels we saw during the Bush and Obama administrations," Rosenblum acknowledged.
Another significant change documented by the MPI analysis is the profile of those deported: Trump's campaign has shifted the focus from newly arrived individuals at the border to immigrants who have lived in the country for years.
Between May and July 2026, the monthly number of deportees who had been in the United States for at least two years increased by 77%, rising from 10,000 to 18,000 cases per month compared to the beginning of the term.
The increase was even more pronounced among those who had been living in the country for a decade or more: those cases soared by 147%, from 2,400 to 6,000 cases per month, between the first quarter of 2025 and the summer of 2026.
In total, 15% of the 980,000 deported individuals had been in the United States for at least ten years, and 61% had lived in the country for at least two years.
The report also questions the self-deportation figures provided by the government. The DHS has claimed that another 2.2 million people left "voluntarily," but Rosenblum's analysis estimates that the actual figure is between 790,000 and 1.9 million cases.
In the specific case of Cubans, almost 12,000 had been deported during Trump's second term up to October 2026, according to recent estimates.
The budget allocated to the immigration enforcement agencies ICE and CBP under the Trump administration currently exceeds that of the main federal law enforcement and public safety agencies in the country, making it even more striking that the results in terms of deporting criminals fall short of those achieved by previous administrations with fewer resources.
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