The Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out 483,200 deportations in fiscal year 2026 — the most in the agency's history — alongside more than 491,000 immigration arrests, also a record. The fiscal year ran from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026.
The deportation total breaks the previous record of 442,640, set only a year earlier in fiscal 2025, and nearly equals all three full fiscal years of the Biden administration combined — 486,000 across fiscal 2022, 2023 and 2024. The arrest total is greater than those three Biden years combined, at fewer than 427,000, and includes nearly 475,000 administrative arrests — by far the highest such figure ICE has ever recorded.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he "couldn't be prouder" of the men and women of ICE. Fiscal 2026 saw "the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE's history," he said, and September 2026 was the best September in the agency's history for arrests. "Thanks to President Trump's leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives."
The year ended at full speed. August set the all-time monthly arrest record at 50,925, breaking July's mark of 50,208, which had itself broken June's 43,900. In September, ICE made more than 48,000 arrests and carried out 44,000 removals — a more than 300% increase over the average September of the Biden years. DHS also says that since President Trump returned to office, nearly 1.2 million illegal aliens have been deported and more than 1.25 million arrested, and that more than 3 million migrants have left the United States in total.
DHS pointed to who the arrests are catching. Tou Lue Vang, an illegal alien from Laos, was convicted in 2006 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for repeatedly assaulting a girl between 2002 and 2004; in June 2026, Governor Tim Walz's Minnesota Clemency Review Commission voted to grant Vang a pardon — and in July, ICE deported him. Raul Genesis Ortiz Moran, an illegal alien from Mexico, has been charged with second-degree murder and aggravated sexual battery after he allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered a 2-year-old girl in Louisa County, Virginia; sheriff's deputies arrested him first and turned him over to ICE. Those charges against Ortiz Moran are allegations, not a conviction, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
One counting note belongs on the record. The figures are ICE's own, and they cover the agency's deportations — not every removal carried out across the whole government. An analysis published Wednesday by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which works from federal immigration records, found that formal removal orders accounted for about 63% of deportations in July and August 2026 — a reminder that the headline deportation total and court-ordered removals are not the same measure.
For the families in Louisa County, and for the Minnesota community where Vang lived, the benefit the administration points to is not abstract: men convicted of, or charged with, crimes against children, who were in the country illegally, are gone — and cannot offend again on American streets. That is the promise DHS says these numbers keep: the enforcement working people were told could not be done, delivered at record scale in a single year.
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