President Donald Trump has set a goal of deporting one million illegal immigrants a year during his second term in office, and according to new estimates based on Census Bureau data, it appears at least that many may have already left the country this year.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not normally issue its annual “Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” until December, so we will not have hard numbers for months, but all indications from other indirect data point to the conclusion that Trump has already made significant progress undoing President Joe Biden’s mass illegal migration.
The federal government does not keep hard numbers on the number of illegal immigrants in the United States, but using data from the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey, the best analysis shows that Biden allowed in approximately 5.6 million illegal immigrants during his four years in office, raising the total number of illegal immigrants in the country to around 15.8 million.
Earlier this month, the Department of Labor issued its monthly employment report showing that more than a million foreign-born workers had left the labor force since March. However, that same metric showed that the foreign-born labor force actually grew by about 600,000 between February and March and was only down about 200,000 total since January of this year.
As good as the data is in the monthly jobs report, it is still only a survey, not a hard count, and can often be noisy. That said, the data we do have shows that the foreign-born workforce is shrinking after steady growth under Biden.
Now, the Center for Immigration Studies has issued its own analysis of Census Bureau data, and they have concluded that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has fallen by over one million since Trump took office for his second term.
“The number of non-citizens is down 1.4 million since January, while the number of naturalized citizens increased by a little over 400,000,” CIS reports. “Since illegal immigrants are not citizens, the decline in the number of people who are not American citizens is consistent with what would be expected if the number of illegal immigrants fell.”
“These results strongly support the idea that the election of Donald Trump, his rhetoric, and high-profile enforcement actions as soon as he took office caused a large number of illegal immigrants to leave the country,” the report concludes.
TRUMP’S DEPORTATION RECORD IS UNDERRATED
There are some caveats with these numbers, however. Again, these are estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the country based on a household survey conducted for the Census Bureau. It is possible that illegal immigrants are now more reluctant to answer Census surveys because of Trump’s enforcement rhetoric and policies.
We will not have a firm picture until ICE issues its annual removal report this December, but for now, all the data we do have points to Trump surpassing his goal of reducing the illegal immigrant population by one million per year.