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: deport 1 million people, report no releases at the U.S.-Mexico border, and arrest thousands of suspected gang members.

For all its boasting, the administration has released less reliable and carefully vetted data than its predecessors on a signature policy that has become one of the most controversial of Trump’s second term.

The lack of information and loss of numbers from a bureau that has traced immigration data back to the 1800s has left researchers, advocates, advocates and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration accountable.

“They don’t release the data,” said Mike Howell, who runs the Oversight Project, a conservative group that advocates for more evictions. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security has been releasing numbers in press releases “that purport to be statistics without statistical support and the numbers have been climbing all over the place.”

With mass deportations a priority, new restrictions and increased enforcement have led to an increase in immigration-related arrests, detentions and deportations.

But it can be difficult to find the metrics that once measured these changes. It’s an expansion of moves by the previous administration to limit the flow of government information by wiping or deleting federal data sets or last year firing the top official overseeing employment data.

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 within the United States.

Originally known as the Office of Immigration Statistics, it has been tracking this data since 1872. In its current form, created under the Biden administration, it also began publishing monthly reports allowing researchers to track developments in near real time.

But the main application indicators on its website have not been updated since the beginning of last year. A note on the page where the monthly reports were located states that they are “delayed while they are under review.”

“It’s the most current data. It’s the most reliable data,” Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who closely tracks immigration data trends, said of the monthly reports. “He has the most omniscient view of immigration enforcement in the entire agency.”

An interactive dashboard launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 once allowed users to review who the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal histories and deportation numbers. ICE called it a “new era of transparency.”

Although intended for quarterly updates, the latest data is from January 2025. The agency’s annual report, typically released in December, had not been released as of mid-March.

Other agencies also release data that touches on immigration, and some parts continue to be released, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics detailing border crossings or the Justice Department’s immigration court data.

But experts say other data has slowed down.

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 has helped researchers study the effects of different policies. Lawyers could cite the figures to support their dispute. Journalists saw it as a powerful tool to hold the government accountable for public demands or to report on important trends.

“We’re all unclear about how immigration enforcement works in an era 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.

The EDS did not respond to detailed questions about why it was no longer publishing specific data.

“This is the most transparent administration in history, we release new data several times a week and at the request of journalists,” the department said in a statement.

The figures published by the administration are inconsistent and unverifiable.

In a Jan. 20 press release, DHS said it had expelled more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second statement, the department put the figure at 622,000. In testimony to Congress on March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the figure was 700,000.

But ICE, an agency of DHS, also releases figures on the number of people removed from the country, as part of a broad data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the numbers puts that number at around 400,000 in Trump’s first year.

DHS said 2.2 million people who were in the United States illegally returned home on their own, but the department offered no explanation for the tally. Experts have questioned the source of this figure, saying it is not a phenomenon historically tracked by DHS.

The ministry did not respond to questions about the provenance of this data.

With primary data sources shut down, researchers, advocates and others have had to rely on information that the administration is obligated to release or that was revealed through legal action.

The release of ICE detention numbers — how many people are detained, for how long and whether they committed a crime — is required by Congress and is typically released every two weeks. But the publication of the figures has experienced some delays and their data is overwritten with each new publication, complicating the work of people who need access to it.

The Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, a research initiative, successfully sued under the Freedom of Information Act to access ICE arrest data, including nationalities, conviction status and whether arrests took place in jails or in the community.

Graeme Blair, co-director of the project, said every administration has struggled to provide transparency in immigration enforcement, and given the Trump administration’s ambitious law enforcement goals, the team wanted to secure and verify information the government might not disclose publicly.

“Given the scale of what they were talking about doing, it seemed really important to be able to understand, to be able to verify those numbers,” he said.

But there are limits, he says. The data obtained through the trial only covers the date of October 15. They do not cover recent operations such as the Minneapolis sweep, when federal immigration agents shot and killed two protesters, leading to widespread demonstrations and scrutiny of enforcement tactics.

The lack 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 is in our country and who needs to leave,” Howell said.