Domestic

Immigration Enforcement

64,508held daily

FY2026 average — the most ever, and 41.6% of them have no criminal charge.

In 1954 the federal government carried out 30,260 removals and 1,074,280 returns — both true, both the same year, differing by a factor of thirty-five. This is what the enforcement apparatus does rather than who arrives: the four different legal acts that all get called deportation, 132 years of them since 1892, the 64,508 people held on an average day in 2026 of whom the largest group has no criminal charge, the 183,180 more under electronic monitoring outside detention, and the 287(g) agreements that went from 135 agencies to 2,411 in twenty months.

In detention now

65,765

FY2026 average 64,508 — above the pre-pandemic peak of 50,165 and triple the FY2021 low.

Held with no charge

41.6%

26,843 of the FY2026 average have no criminal conviction and no pending charge.

Removals, FY2025

442,637

DHS’s count of ICE removals. The Migration Policy Institute puts the same year near 340,000.

287(g) reach

2,411

Agreements across 39 states, August 2026 — from 135 agencies in December 2024.

Under supervision

183,180

On electronic monitoring outside detention: 127,296 by phone app, 53,192 on ankle monitors.

Nobody agrees how many people were deported, and everybody is right

The argument about deportation numbers is almost never an argument about arithmetic. It is an argument about which column somebody counted, conducted by people who have not said which column they counted. The government keeps four of them, on purpose, because they are four different things that happen to a person.

In 1954 the federal government carried out 30,260 removals and 1,074,280 enforcement returns. Both figures are true, both describe the same year, and they differ by a factor of thirty-five. That year is remembered as the largest deportation campaign in American history — and almost none of it was deportation in the legal sense.

Removal

A formal order, with consequences that last.

A noncitizen is ordered out by an immigration judge or an authorised officer. It carries a bar on returning — typically five, ten or twenty years — and coming back before it expires is a federal crime. This is the column most people mean by "deportation", and it is the smallest of them for most of the last century.

Return

Sent back without an order.

A noncitizen is turned around without formal proceedings, historically at or near the border. No judge, no lasting bar, and until recently no record that follows the person. Table 39 splits these into administrative returns and enforcement returns. In 1954 there were 1,074,280 enforcement returns against 30,260 removals.

Expulsion

A public-health power, not an immigration one.

Title 42 of the US Code let border officials expel people to prevent the spread of communicable disease, and was used from March 2020 to May 2023. It is not an immigration proceeding at all, produces no immigration record, and a person could be expelled repeatedly in a week. It peaked at 1,103,970 in FY2022, which is more than every removal in that year by a factor of ten.

Detention

Held while the case runs — not a sentence.

Immigration detention is civil, not criminal. It exists to secure a person for proceedings or removal, not to punish, which is why there is no fixed term and why the constitutional limits on how long it may last are still being argued. In FY2026 the average daily population was 64,508, of whom 26,843 had no criminal conviction and no pending charge.

287(g)

Local police doing federal immigration work.

A section of the 1996 immigration act that lets DHS deputize state and local officers to perform specified immigration functions under federal supervision. It ran at 135 agencies in December 2024 and 2,411 agreements by August 2026. It is the mechanism that turns a traffic stop into an immigration arrest.