Washington — The Trump administration loves to promote it Immigration Enforcement Agenda By the numbers, with ambitious goals of deporting 1 million people, reporting that no one has been released at the US-Mexico border, and arresting thousands of alleged gang members.
For all the boasting, the administration has been making less reliable and carefully vetted statements than its predecessors about what has become a signature policy One of the most controversial From Trump’s second term.
The gap in information and the loss of numbers from the office that had been tracking immigration data back to the 19th century left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration accountable.
“They’re not releasing the data,” said Mike Howell, who heads the Conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group calling for more deportations. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security published numbers in news releases “claiming to be statistics without statistical support, and the numbers jumped all over the place,” Howell said.
With mass deportations being prioritized, new restrictions and increased law enforcement have… An increase in immigration arrestsArrests and deportations.
But finding metrics that measured those changes before can be difficult. It is an extension of the previous administration’s moves to limit the flow of government information Washing or removing Federal data sets or By shooting last year One of the senior officials supervising job data.
The Bureau of Homeland Security Statistics is responsible for publishing figures released by homeland security agencies, Including removals and nationalities of deportees, to provide a comprehensive picture of migration trends at the border and within the United States.
Originally known as the Bureau of Immigration Statistics, it has tracked such data since 1872. In its current form, created under the Biden administration, it also began publishing monthly reports that allowed researchers to track developments in near real time.
But key implementation metrics on its website have not been updated since early last year. There was a note on the page where the monthly reports were that said “they are overdue and are under review.”
“It’s the most timely data,” Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who closely tracks immigration data trends, said of the monthly reports. “It’s the most reliable data.” “She has the most informed view of immigration enforcement across the entire agency.”
An interactive dashboard launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 allows users to check the people the agency has been detaining, their nationalities, criminal histories and removal numbers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement called it a “new era of transparency.”
Although it is intended for quarterly updates, the most recent data goes back to January 2025. The agency’s annual report, which is typically released in December, was not published until mid-March.
Other agencies also publish immigration-related data, parts of which continue to be published, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics detailing border encounters or data from the Justice Department’s immigration courts.
But experts say other data has lagged.
The most recent visa issuance data from the Department of State is from August. Key statistics from USCIS have not been updated since October.
Missing data have now helped researchers study the effects of different policies. Lawyers can cite Personalities to support their claims. Journalists saw it as a powerful tool for holding the government to account for public claims or for reporting important trends.
“We are all somewhat in the dark about how immigration enforcement works at a time when it is taking new and unprecedented forms,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the Program on American Immigration Policy at the Migration Policy Institute.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about why it stopped publishing specific data.
The ministry said in a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in history, and we publish new data several times a week and at the request of reporters.”
The numbers published by the administration are inconsistent and cannot be verified.
In a January 20 press release, the Department of Homeland Security said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second statement, the ministry put the number at 622,000. in Congressional testimony On March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the number was 700,000.
But ICE, an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, also releases numbers on how many people it has evacuated from the country, part of a larger data release mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the numbers estimated this number at about 400,000 during Trump’s first year.
The Department of Homeland Security said that 2.2 million people who were in the United States illegally returned home on their own, but the department did not provide any explanation for this number. Experts have questioned the source of this number, saying this has not been something DHS has historically tracked.
The administration did not respond to questions about the source of this data.
As major sources of data ceased, researchers, advocates, and others were forced to rely on information that the administration was obligated to report or that had been disclosed through legal processes.
Publish ICE Detention Numbers – How Many people are detainedfor how long and whether they committed a crime – is required by Congress and is generally issued every two weeks. But the release of the numbers has encountered some delays, and their data is replaced with each new publication, which complicates the work of people who need to access them.
The Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, a research initiative, successfully filed a lawsuit through the Freedom of Information Act To access data about ICE arrests Including nationalities, conviction status, and whether arrests occurred in prisons or in the community.
Each administration has fought for transparency in immigration enforcement, and given the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement goals, the team wanted to secure and verify information the government might not release publicly, said Graeme Blair, co-director of the project.
“Given the scale of what they were talking about, it seemed really important to be able to understand, to be able to double-check those numbers,” he said.
But he said there are limitations. The data obtained through the lawsuit only lasts through October 15. It does not cover recent operations of this nature With increased application Minneapoliswhen federal immigration officers 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 as we deserve to know who is in our country and who needs to leave,” Howell said.