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In one sense, President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have been a complete success. Under President Joe Biden, the federal government lost meaningful control of the southern border, catching and releasing thousands of illegal immigrants into the country every day. Thanks to Trump’s new detention and deportation policies, that number has dropped to zero.
The Biden border crisis has been solved.
But what about all the damage Biden caused before Trump came back into office? According to separate estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and the Center for Immigration Studies, somewhere north of 8 million immigrants flowed into the United States on net during Biden’s presidency, a historically large surge and greater than all immigration from the preceding 12 years combined.
The CBO has declined to estimate what percentage of this surge was made of illegal immigrants. Goldman Sachs puts it at about 5 million, while the CIS estimates it to be 5.4 million.
Those 5 million-plus illegal immigrants will strain local budgets as communities are forced to house, educate, and feed them. Federal taxpayers will feel the hit too, as our Medicaid dollars are forced to pay for their free healthcare. And those harms don’t even count the identity theft and unlicensed driving committed by illegal immigrants every day, nor do they take into account the lower wages native-born Americans must accept as they compete with cheap immigrant labor.
Trump has promised to undo the damage caused by Biden’s border crisis by deporting 1 million illegal immigrants a year. But the record for Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations is 133,000, set in 2013 by President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, after setting that record for internal deportations, which are not to be confused with removals done by Customs and Border Protection at the southern border, Obama promptly dismantled and defunded ICE’s deportation capabilities.
In November 2014, Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson released a memo setting new enforcement priorities for ICE. Johnson directed ICE agents to focus deportation efforts only on national security threats, those with multiple misdemeanors, and those with recent removal orders. All other illegal immigrants were to be ignored. The deportation of illegal immigrants from the interior of the country rapidly fell. By 2016, just 65,000 illegal immigrants were deported from the interior of the country by ICE.
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Trump was able to get those numbers up to over 95,000 by 2018, but he could never get Congress to give him the funding he needed to properly invest in ICE detention and removal capabilities. And then when Biden won the White House in 2020, he ordered interior deportations halted altogether. In 2022, just 22,000 illegal immigrants were deported from the interior of the U.S. while Biden was busy releasing 2 million illegal immigrants into the country.
Trump was able to secure over $100 billion in investments for ICE’s detention and removal capabilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but it will take time for those 10,000 new ICE officers to be hired and for 100,000 new detention bed space to be built. Trump can’t simply snap his fingers and jump from under 50,000 deportations in 2024 to 1 million in 2025. It will take time to build the infrastructure necessary to undo the damage Biden caused.
In theory, we should be able to track how many illegal immigrants ICE is deporting every month. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics used to publish a report titled “Immigration Enforcement and Legal Processes Monthly Tables,” but it has not been updated since January. ICE has an “Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics” dashboard on its website, and it is useful for looking at past data, but it, too, has not been updated since early 2025.
We simply do not know how many illegal immigrants Trump has deported, and we probably won’t know until ICE publishes its annual report in December. And that assumes the ICE annual report will come out on time. There is no guarantee that it will.
Ultimately, Trump does not have to deport every illegal immigrant who entered the U.S. to be successful. Illegal immigrants crossed into the U.S. by themselves — they can leave by themselves, too. Hundreds of these self-deportations are happening every day. The problem is that there is simply no way for the government, or the American people, to track them. We do have some tools that can give us an estimate of how many illegal immigrants are self-deporting, but just like the estimates of how many illegal immigrants Biden let in, they are just that: estimates.
Every month, at the behest of the Labor Department, the Census Bureau surveys 60,000 households recruited in person by census field representatives. This data is then compiled into the Current Population Survey, which the Labor Department uses each month to come up with the unemployment rate for the monthly jobs report. Census representatives recruit households randomly and do not exclude households that include illegal immigrants.
The Census asks questions about the age, sex, race, marital status, education level, and employment status of everyone in the household each month. In addition to these and other questions, the Census also asks whether or not each person in the household was born in the U.S. The data from this survey are then used to estimate the size of the labor force, the number of people employed, and the unemployment rate.
Using this CPS data, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that since Trump took office, the number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. has declined by 2.2 million, with 1.6 million of those being illegal immigrants.
Partisans such as Jed Kolko, who served as undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs while Biden was letting over 5 million illegal immigrants into the country, have criticized the CIS for using the CPS data to estimate the number of illegal immigrants who have left the country since Trump took office. Kolko argues that the CPS data are not designed to estimate the foreign-born population. But Kolko offers no method for coming up with a more accurate number, nor does he venture a guess as to how many he believes have left since January.
Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center has issued its own estimate of how many immigrants have left since Trump took office, pegging the number at around 1.4 million. Unlike the CIS, Pew does not venture a guess as to how many of those immigrants who have left were illegal, but presumably, it is the vast majority of them.
Neither the CIS nor Pew numbers should be taken as gospel. Both are rough estimates based on what is essentially a poll, albeit a very large and highly respected one. All data are imperfect. And the CPS is not immune to that, especially because, like all polls, it has suffered from declining response rates. But the most recent decline in CPS response rates is in line with pre-Trump trends, and there is little evidence that the CPS numbers have been compromised. They are simply the best data we have available. Setting aside his jobs report trutherism, Kolko does admit that it is likely the immigrant population that has declined under Trump, but he just refuses to put a number on the departures.
Whether you like the CIS’s 1.6 million number or Pew’s 1.4 million, it is highly probable that Trump has already met and will soon surpass his goal of decreasing the illegal immigrant population by 1 million this year. These departures may not all come in the form official deportations, indeed the majority of them are likely to be self-deportations, but for taxpayers, self-deportations are the best kind because they are essentially free.
The declining illegal immigrant population does create some interesting economic effects. Births in the U.S. are still set to outpace deaths until 2033. Currently, we are adding about half a million people a year without immigration. But if over 1 million illegal immigrants are leaving while just 500,000 Americans are being born, that means the workforce is likely to shrink until the Biden border crisis flood has dissipated. That means overall job growth will seem anemic as illegal immigrant jobs disappear and jobs for Americans are added.
Fortunately, this will most likely cause an increase in productivity because illegal immigrants are generally less educated and less productive than American workers. But it does create a headwind for topline job growth and GDP numbers, something to keep in mind as future jobs and economic reports are produced.
Trump’s deportation record cannot be judged solely by ICE’s official numbers. While his administration is still building the capacity to deport on the scale promised, the available data strongly suggest that the illegal immigrant population is already shrinking — whether through deportations or self-deportations. That distinction matters less to taxpayers, who benefit either way. The real question is whether Trump can sustain this trend long enough to offset the historic surge of illegal immigration under Biden. If he does, it will mark one of the most significant reversals of immigration policy in modern history and a clear test of long-term enforcement credibility.