How Many People Has ICE Deported in 2026?
483,200 people. The Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday that ICE carried out 483,200 deportations in fiscal year 2026 — the most in the agency's 23-year history. One caution belongs with the number from the start: fiscal year 2026 is not the calendar year 2026. It ran from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, so the record was already complete six weeks before it was announced.
The plain reality behind the headline is that a record can be real and still be built wider than the records before it. Case-level data gathered by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, published Wednesday, show that formal removals made up 63 percent of deportations in July and August 2026, with much of the rest made up of voluntary departures ordered by immigration judges, a category that grew more than tenfold. The clearinghouse's own broad projection, about 481,000, lands close to the department's figure, so the total is not invented — but "deported" in the 2026 count covers more kinds of departures than the word used to mean.
What the administration claims is an unleashed agency and a promise kept. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the total passed the previous record of 442,640 set in fiscal 2025, beat the 409,849 removals of fiscal 2012, and nearly matched all three full Biden fiscal years combined, which came to 486,000. ICE also made more than 491,000 arrests in the year, nearly 475,000 of them administrative arrests — arrests for civil immigration violations rather than criminal charges — with a single-month record of 50,925 arrests in August and more than 48,000 arrests and 44,000 removals in September alone. Our report of the announcement is here.
"Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE's history."
The common-sense principle is simple: a number answers only the question it was counted for. This one answers how many people the agency processed out of the country under its widest count. It does not answer the question the crackdown was sold on — how many criminals were removed — because, as the Associated Press noted on Thursday, the department's release gives no breakdown of how many of the arrested or deported had criminal histories, the breakdown previous administrations reported as a matter of routine.
The consequence is that the biggest enforcement number in the agency's history arrives without the one detail that would let the public judge it. The nearest independent measure, from the Migration Policy Institute, found that about 20 percent of the roughly 980,000 people deported by ICE and the border agencies together from January 2025 through July 2026 had criminal convictions — a different period and a wider set of agencies, offered here only to show the shape of the gap, not as the missing figure itself. Until Homeland Security publishes the breakdown for these 483,200, the record stands as a measure of volume, not of who was actually taken off the streets. When that breakdown comes, how many of the 483,200 will turn out to have been convicted of a crime?
The department's wider totals give the year its scale: as of October, Homeland Security says, nearly 1.2 million people have been deported and more than 1.25 million arrested since President Trump returned to office. Mullin closed the announcement by tying the record directly to the president who ordered the crackdown: "Thanks to President Trump's leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives."